Poetry

To the Virgins,
Sonnet 29
A Pslam of Life
Ardent Ways
Ulysses
The Hollow Men
O me! O Life!
A Valediction Forbidden Mourning
Invictus
Eloisa to Abelard
Sonnet 31
In Flander's Fields
Suicide in the Trenches
The Birches
Nothing Gold Can Stay
Song of Myself
The Gilded
Dulce et Decorum Est
How to Die
No Man is an Island
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
The Unknown Citizen
The Moose
The Raven
Out, Out-
Casey Jones
Ode
The Tuft of Flowers
A Dream Within a Dream
Psalm 52
On First Looking into Chapman's Homer
Musee des Beaux Arts
The Lady of Shalott
Golden Slumbers
Stella's Birthday March 13th, 1727
Last Thoughts on Woody Guthry
The Wasteland
Howl
An Author to Her Book
216
632
Mending Wall
Of Modern Poetry
The Four Ages of Man
The Second Coming
In a Station of the Metro
The School Boy
Tintern Abbery

To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time ~ Robert Herrick

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old time is still a-flying :
And this same flower that smiles to-day
To-morrow will be dying.
The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,
The higher he's a-getting,
The sooner will his race be run,
And nearer he's to setting.
That age is best which is the first,
When youth and blood are warmer ;
But being spent, the worse, and worst
Times still succeed the former.
Then be not coy, but use your time,
And while ye may go marry :
For having lost but once your prime
You may for ever tarry.
Sonnet 29 ~ William Shakespeare
When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bottless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate;
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possest,
Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope.
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee - and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;
For thy seet love remember'd, such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
A Pslam of Life ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
What the heart of the young man 
said to the pslamist.
Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!-
For the soul is dead that slumbers
And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
Find us farther than to-day.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world's broad field of battle,
br>In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!

Trust no future, howe'er pleasant!
Let the dead past bury its dead!
Act,-act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God o'erhead!

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make out lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o'er life's solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing.
Learn to labor and to wait. 
Adrent Ways~James Joyce
Are you not weary of ardent ways,
Lure of fallen seraphim?
Tell no more of enchanted days.

Your eyes have set man's heart ablaze
And you have had your will of him.
Are you not weary of ardent ways?

Above the flame the smoke of praise
Goes up from ocean rim to rim.
Tell no more of enchanted days.

Our broken cries and mournful lays
Rise in one eucharistic hymn.
Are you not weary of ardent ways?

While sacrificing hands upraise
The chalice flowing to the brim,
Tell no more of enchanted days.

And still you hold our long gaze
With languorous look and lavish limb!
Are you not weary of ardent ways?
Tell no more of enchanted days.
Invictus ~ William Ernest Henley
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud,
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
Ulysses ~ Alfred Lord Tennyson
        It little profits that an idle king,
        By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
        Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole
        Unequal laws unto a savage race,
        That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

        I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
        Life to the lees: all times I have enjoyed
        Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those
        That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when
        Through scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
        Vexed the dim sea: I am become a name;
        For always roaming with a hungry heart
        Much have I seen and known; cities of men
        And manners, climates, councils, governments,
        Myself not least, but honoured of them all;
        And drunk delight of battle with my peers;
        Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
        I am part of all that I have met;
        Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
        Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades
        For ever and for ever when I move.
        How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
        To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
        As though to breath were life. Life piled on life
        Were all to little, and of one to me
        Little remains: but every hour is saved
        From that eternal silence, something more,
        A bringer of new things; and vile it were
        For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
        And this grey spirit yearning in desire
        To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
        Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

        This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
        To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle--
        Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
        This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
        A rugged people, and through soft degrees
        Subdue them to the useful and the good.
        Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
        Of common duties, decent not to fail
        In offices of tenderness, and pay
        Meet adoration to my household gods,
        When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

        There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
        There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners,
        Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me--
        That ever with a frolic welcome took
        The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
        Free hearts, free foreheads--you and I are old;
        Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
        Death closes all: but something ere the end,
        Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
        Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
        The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
        The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
        Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
        'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
        Push off, and sitting well in order smite
        The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
        To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
        Of all the western stars, until I die.
        It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
        It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
        And see the great Achilles, whom we knew

        Tho' much is taken, much abides; and though
        We are not now that strength which in old days
        Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
        One equal temper of heroic hearts,
        Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
        To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
The Hollow Men ~ T.S. Eliot
            MISTAH KURTZ -- HE DEAD.
            A penny for the Old Guy

                                  I
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw.  Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us--if at all--not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.
                                  II
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death's dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer--

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom
                                  III
This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.
                                  IV
The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
and avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.
                                  V
Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the shadow
                                For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
                                                Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
and the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
                                For Thine is the Kingdom

For thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
O Me! O Life!~ Walt Whitman
O me! O Life! of the questions of these recurring,
Of the endless trains of the faithless, or cities fill'd with the foolish,
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew'd
Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds, I see around me.
Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined,
The question, O me! so sad, recurring - What good amid these, O me, O life?
Answer
That you are here - that life exists and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.
A Valediction Forbidden Mourning~John Donne
As virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls, to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
The breath goes now, and some say, no;
So let us melt, and make no noise
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move,
T'were prophanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.

Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears,
Men reckon what it did and meant,
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.
Dull sublunary lovers love
(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absense, because it doth remove
Those things which elemented it.
But we by a love, so much refin'd
That ourselves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
Careless, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.
Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to aaery thinness beat.
If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two,
Thy soul the fixt foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the'other do.
And though it in the center sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.
Such wilt thou be to mee, who must
Like th'other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end, where I begun.
Eloisa to Abelard ~ Alexander Pope
In these deep solitudes and awful cells,
Where heav'nly-pensive contemplation dwells,
And ever-musing melancholy reigns;
What means this tumult in a vestal's veins?
Why rove my thoughts beyond this last retreat?
Why feels my heart its long-forgotten heat?
Yet, yet I love!  From Abelard it came,
And Eloisa yet must kiss the name.

Dear fatal name! rest ever unreveal'd,
Nor pass these lips in holy silence seal'd.
Hide it, my heart, within that close disguise,
Where mix'd with God's, his lov'd idea lies:
O write it not, my hand  the name appears
Already written  wash it out, my tears!
In vain lost Eloisa weeps and prays,
Her heart still dictates, and her hand obeys.

Relentless walls! whose darksome round contains
Repentant sighs, and voluntary pains:
Ye rugged rocks! which holy knees have worn;
Ye grots and caverns shagg'd with horrid thorn!
Shrines! where their vigils pale-ey'd virgins keep,
And pitying saints, whose statues learn to weep!
Though cold like you, unmov'd, and silent grown,
I have not yet forgot myself to stone.
All is not Heav'n's while Abelard has part,
Still rebel nature holds out half my heart;
Nor pray'rs nor fasts its stubborn pulse restrain,
Nor tears, for ages, taught to flow in vain.

Soon as thy letters trembling I unclose,
That well-known name awakens all my woes.
Oh name for ever sad! for ever dear!
Still breath'd in sighs, still usher'd with a tear.
I tremble too, where'er my own I find,
Some dire misfortune follows close behind.
Line after line my gushing eyes o'erflow,
Led through a sad variety of woe:
Now warm in love, now with'ring in thy bloom,
Lost in a convent's solitary gloom!
There stern religion quench'd th' unwilling flame,
There died the best of passions, love and fame.

Yet write, oh write me all, that I may join
Griefs to thy griefs, and echo sighs to thine.
Nor foes nor fortune take this pow'r away;
And is my Abelard less kind than they?
Tears still are mine, and those I need not spare,
Love but demands what else were shed in pray'r;
No happier task these faded eyes pursue;
To read and weep is all they now can do.

Then share thy pain, allow that sad relief;
Ah, more than share it! give me all thy grief.
Heav'n first taught letters for some wretch's aid,
Some banish'd lover, or some captive maid;
They live, they speak, they breathe what love inspires,
Warm from the soul, and faithful to its fires,
The virgin's wish without her fears impart,
Excuse the blush, and pour out all the heart,
Speed the soft intercourse from soul to soul,
And waft a sigh from Indus to the Pole.

Thou know'st how guiltless first I met thy flame,
When Love approach'd me under Friendship's name;
My fancy form'd thee of angelic kind,
Some emanation of th' all-beauteous Mind.
Those smiling eyes, attemp'ring ev'ry day,
Shone sweetly lambent with celestial day.
Guiltless I gaz'd; heav'n listen'd while you sung;
And truths divine came mended from that tongue.
From lips like those what precept fail'd to move?
Too soon they taught me 'twas no sin to love.
Back through the paths of pleasing sense I ran,
Nor wish'd an Angel whom I lov'd a Man.
Dim and remote the joys of saints I see;
Nor envy them, that heav'n I lose for thee.

How oft, when press'd to marriage, have I said,
Curse on all laws but those which love has made!
Love, free as air, at sight of human ties,
Spreads his light wings, and in a moment flies,
Let wealth, let honour, wait the wedded dame,
August her deed, and sacred be her fame;
Before true passion all those views remove,
Fame, wealth, and honour! what are you to Love?
The jealous God, when we profane his fires,
Those restless passions in revenge inspires;
And bids them make mistaken mortals groan,
Who seek in love for aught but love alone.
Should at my feet the world's great master fall,
Himself, his throne, his world, I'd scorn 'em all:
Not Caesar's empress would I deign to prove;
No, make me mistress to the man I love;
If there be yet another name more free,
More fond than mistress, make me that to thee!
Oh happy state! when souls each other draw,
When love is liberty, and nature, law:
All then is full, possessing, and possess'd,
No craving void left aching in the breast:
Ev'n thought meets thought, ere from the lips it part,
And each warm wish springs mutual from the heart.
This sure is bliss (if bliss on earth there be)
And once the lot of Abelard and me.

Alas, how chang'd! what sudden horrors rise!
A naked lover bound and bleeding lies!
Where, where was Eloise? her voice, her hand,
Her poniard, had oppos'd the dire command.
Barbarian, stay! that bloody stroke restrain;
The crime was common, common be the pain.
I can no more; by shame, by rage suppress'd,
Let tears, and burning blushes speak the rest.

Canst thou forget that sad, that solemn day,
When victims at yon altar's foot we lay?
Canst thou forget what tears that moment fell,
When, warm in youth, I bade the world farewell?
As with cold lips I kiss'd the sacred veil,
The shrines all trembl'd, and the lamps grew pale:
Heav'n scarce believ'd the conquest it survey'd,
And saints with wonder heard the vows I made.
Yet then, to those dread altars as I drew,
Not on the Cross my eyes were fix'd, but you:
Not grace, or zeal, love only was my call,
And if I lose thy love, I lose my all.
Come! with thy looks, thy words, relieve my woe;
Those still at least are left thee to bestow.
Still on that breast enamour'd let me lie,
Still drink delicious poison from thy eye,
Pant on thy lip, and to thy heart be press'd;
Give all thou canst  and let me dream the rest.
Ah no! instruct me other joys to prize,
With other beauties charm my partial eyes,
Full in my view set all the bright abode,
And make my soul quit Abelard for God.

Ah, think at least thy flock deserves thy care,
Plants of thy hand, and children of thy pray'r.
From the false world in early youth they fled,
By thee to mountains, wilds, and deserts led.
You rais'd these hallow'd walls; the desert smil'd,
And Paradise was open'd in the wild.
No weeping orphan saw his father's stores
Our shrines irradiate, or emblaze the floors;
No silver saints, by dying misers giv'n,
Here brib'd the rage of ill-requited heav'n:
But such plain roofs as piety could raise,
And only vocal with the Maker's praise.
In these lone walls (their days eternal bound)
These moss-grown domes with spiry turrets crown'd,
Where awful arches make a noonday night,
And the dim windows shed a solemn light;
Thy eyes diffus'd a reconciling ray,
And gleams of glory brighten'd all the day.
But now no face divine contentment wears,
'Tis all blank sadness, or continual tears.
See how the force of others' pray'rs I try,
(O pious fraud of am'rous charity!)
But why should I on others' pray'rs depend?
Come thou, my father, brother, husband, friend!
Ah let thy handmaid, sister, daughter move,
And all those tender names in one, thy love!
The darksome pines that o'er yon rocks reclin'd
Wave high, and murmur to the hollow wind,
The wand'ring streams that shine between the hills,
The grots that echo to the tinkling rills,
The dying gales that pant upon the trees,
The lakes that quiver to the curling breeze;
No more these scenes my meditation aid,
Or lull to rest the visionary maid.
But o'er the twilight groves and dusky caves,
Long-sounding aisles, and intermingled graves,
Black Melancholy sits, and round her throws
A death-like silence, and a dread repose:
Her gloomy presence saddens all the scene,
Shades ev'ry flow'r, and darkens ev'ry green,
Deepens the murmur of the falling floods,
And breathes a browner horror on the woods.

Yet here for ever, ever must I stay;
Sad proof how well a lover can obey!
Death, only death, can break the lasting chain;
And here, ev'n then, shall my cold dust remain,
Here all its frailties, all its flames resign,
And wait till 'tis no sin to mix with thine.

Ah wretch! believ'd the spouse of God in vain,
Confess'd within the slave of love and man.
Assist me, Heav'n! but whence arose that pray'r?
Sprung it from piety, or from despair?
Ev'n here, where frozen chastity retires,
Love finds an altar for forbidden fires.
I ought to grieve, but cannot what I ought;
I mourn the lover, not lament the fault;
I view my crime, but kindle at the view,
Repent old pleasures, and solicit new;
Now turn'd to Heav'n, I weep my past offence,
Now think of thee, and curse my innocence.
Of all affliction taught a lover yet,
'Tis sure the hardest science to forget!
How shall I lose the sin, yet keep the sense,
And love th' offender, yet detest th' offence?
How the dear object from the crime remove,
Or how distinguish penitence from love?
Unequal task! a passion to resign,
For hearts so touch'd, so pierc'd, so lost as mine.
Ere such a soul regains its peaceful state,
How often must it love, how often hate!
How often hope, despair, resent, regret,
Conceal, disdain  do all things but forget.
But let Heav'n seize it, all at once 'tis fir'd;
Not touch'd, but rapt; not waken'd, but inspir'd!
Oh come! oh teach me nature to subdue,
Renounce my love, my life, myself  and you.
Fill my fond heart with God alone, for he
Alone can rival, can succeed to thee.

How happy is the blameless vestal's lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd;
Labour and rest, that equal periods keep;
"Obedient slumbers that can wake and weep;"
Desires compos'd, affections ever ev'n,
Tears that delight, and sighs that waft to Heav'n.
Grace shines around her with serenest beams,
And whisp'ring angels prompt her golden dreams.
For her th' unfading rose of Eden blooms,
And wings of seraphs shed divine perfumes,
For her the Spouse prepares the bridal ring,
For her white virgins hymeneals sing,
To sounds of heav'nly harps she dies away,
And melts in visions of eternal day.

Far other dreams my erring soul employ,
Far other raptures, of unholy joy:
When at the close of each sad, sorrowing day,
Fancy restores what vengeance snatch'd away,
Then conscience sleeps, and leaving nature free,
All my loose soul unbounded springs to thee.
Oh curs'd, dear horrors of all-conscious night!
How glowing guilt exalts the keen delight!
Provoking Daemons all restraint remove,

And stir within me every source of love.
I hear thee, view thee, gaze o'er all thy charms,
And round thy phantom glue my clasping arms.
I wake  no more I hear, no more I view,
The phantom flies me, as unkind as you.
I call aloud; it hears not what I say;
I stretch my empty arms; it glides away.
To dream once more I close my willing eyes;
Ye soft illusions, dear deceits, arise!
Alas, no more  methinks we wand'ring go
Through dreary wastes, and weep each other's woe,
Where round some mould'ring tower pale ivy creeps,
And low-brow'd rocks hang nodding o'er the deeps.
Sudden you mount, you beckon from the skies;
Clouds interpose, waves roar, and winds arise.
I shriek, start up, the same sad prospect find,
And wake to all the griefs I left behind.

For thee the fates, severely kind, ordain
A cool suspense from pleasure and from pain;
Thy life a long, dead calm of fix'd repose;
No pulse that riots, and no blood that glows.
Still as the sea, ere winds were taught to blow,
Or moving spirit bade the waters flow;
Soft as the slumbers of a saint forgiv'n,
And mild as opening gleams of promis'd heav'n.

Come, Abelard! for what hast thou to dread?
The torch of Venus burns not for the dead.
Nature stands check'd; Religion disapproves;
Ev'n thou art cold  yet Eloisa loves.
Ah hopeless, lasting flames! like those that burn
To light the dead, and warm th' unfruitful urn.

What scenes appear where'er I turn my view?
The dear ideas, where I fly, pursue,
Rise in the grove, before the altar rise,
Stain all my soul, and wanton in my eyes.
I waste the matin lamp in sighs for thee,
Thy image steals between my God and me,
Thy voice I seem in ev'ry hymn to hear,
With ev'ry bead I drop too soft a tear.
When from the censer clouds of fragrance roll,
And swelling organs lift the rising soul,
One thought of thee puts all the pomp to flight,
Priests, tapers, temples, swim before my sight:
In seas of flame my plunging soul is drown'd,
While altars blaze, and angels tremble round.

While prostrate here in humble grief I lie,
Kind, virtuous drops just gath'ring in my eye,
While praying, trembling, in the dust I roll,
And dawning grace is op'ning on my soul:
Come, if thou dar'st, all charming as thou art!
Oppose thyself to Heav'n; dispute my heart;
Come, with one glance of those deluding eyes
Blot out each bright idea of the skies;
Take back that grace, those sorrows, and those tears;
Take back my fruitless penitence and pray'rs;
Snatch me, just mounting, from the blest abode;
Assist the fiends, and tear me from my God!

No, fly me, fly me, far as pole from pole;
Rise Alps between us! and whole oceans roll!
Ah, come not, write not, think not once of me,
Nor share one pang of all I felt for thee.
Thy oaths I quit, thy memory resign;
Forget, renounce me, hate whate'er was mine.
Fair eyes, and tempting looks (which yet I view!)
Long lov'd, ador'd ideas, all adieu!
Oh Grace serene! oh virtue heav'nly fair!
Divine oblivion of low-thoughted care!
Fresh blooming hope, gay daughter of the sky!
And faith, our early immortality!
Enter, each mild, each amicable guest;
Receive, and wrap me in eternal rest!

See in her cell sad Eloisa spread,
Propp'd on some tomb, a neighbour of the dead.
In each low wind methinks a spirit calls,
And more than echoes talk along the walls.
Here, as I watch'd the dying lamps around,
From yonder shrine I heard a hollow sound.
"Come, sister, come!" (it said, or seem'd to say)
"Thy place is here, sad sister, come away!
Once like thyself, I trembled, wept, and pray'd,
Love's victim then, though now a sainted maid:
But all is calm in this eternal sleep;
Here grief forgets to groan, and love to weep,
Ev'n superstition loses ev'ry fear:
For God, not man, absolves our frailties here."

I come, I come! prepare your roseate bow'rs,
Celestial palms, and ever-blooming flow'rs.
Thither, where sinners may have rest, I go,
Where flames refin'd in breasts seraphic glow:
Thou, Abelard! the last sad office pay,
And smooth my passage to the realms of day;
See my lips tremble, and my eye-balls roll,
Suck my last breath, and catch my flying soul!
Ah no  in sacred vestments may'st thou stand,
The hallow'd taper trembling in thy hand,
Present the cross before my lifted eye,
Teach me at once, and learn of me to die.
Ah then, thy once-lov'd Eloisa see!
It will be then no crime to gaze on me.
See from my cheek the transient roses fly!
See the last sparkle languish in my eye!
Till ev'ry motion, pulse, and breath be o'er;
And ev'n my Abelard be lov'd no more.
O Death all-eloquent! you only prove
What dust we dote on, when 'tis man we love.

Then too, when fate shall thy fair frame destroy,
(That cause of all my guilt, and all my joy)
In trance ecstatic may thy pangs be drown'd,
Bright clouds descend, and angels watch thee round,
From op'ning skies may streaming glories shine,
And saints embrace thee with a love like mine.

May one kind grave unite each hapless name,
And graft my love immortal on thy fame!
Then, ages hence, when all my woes are o'er,
When this rebellious heart shall beat no more;
If ever chance two wand'ring lovers brings
To Paraclete's white walls and silver springs,
O'er the pale marble shall they join their heads,
And drink the falling tears each other sheds;
Then sadly say, with mutual pity mov'd,
"Oh may we never love as these have lov'd!"

From the full choir when loud Hosannas rise,
And swell the pomp of dreadful sacrifice,
Amid that scene if some relenting eye
Glance on the stone where our cold relics lie,
Devotion's self shall steal a thought from Heav'n,
One human tear shall drop and be forgiv'n.
And sure, if fate some future bard shall join
In sad similitude of griefs to mine,
Condemn'd whole years in absence to deplore,
And image charms he must behold no more;
Such if there be, who loves so long, so well;
Let him our sad, our tender story tell;
The well-sung woes will soothe my pensive ghost;
He best can paint 'em, who shall feel 'em most.
Sonnet 31 ~ Sir. Philip Sidney
With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb'st the skies !
How silently, and with how wan a face !
What, may it be that even in heavenly place
That busy archer his sharp arrows tries?
Sure, if that long with love-acquainted eyes
Can judge of love, thou feel'st a lover's case;
I read it in thy looks;  thy languisht grace
To me that feel the like, thy state descries.
Then, even of fellowship, O Moon, tell me,
Is constant love deemed there but want of wit?
Are beauties there as proud as here they be?
Do they above love to be loved, and yet
    Those lovers scorn whom that love doth possess?
    Do they call virtue there, ungratefulness?
In Flander's Fields ~ John McCrae
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
Suicide in the Trenches ~ Siegfried Sassoon
    I knew a simple soldier boy
    Who grinned at life in empty joy,
    Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
    And whistled early with the lark.

    In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
    With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
    He put a bullet through his brain.
    No one spoke of him again.

    You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
    Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
    Sneak home and pray you'll never know
    The hell where youth and laughter go.
The Birches ~ Robert Frost
When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boys been swinging them.
But swinging doesnt bend them down to stay.
Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them
        
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the suns warmth makes them shed crystal shells
        
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
Youd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
       
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
        
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm
(Now am I free to be poetical?)
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows
        
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his fathers trees
By riding them down over and over again
        
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away

Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
        
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
Its when Im weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
        
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twigs having lashed across it open.
Id like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
        
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earths the right place for love:
I dont know where its likely to go better.
Id like to go by climbing a birch tree,
        
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.
Nothing Gold Can Stay ~ Robert Frost
Nature's first green is gold
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay. 
Song of Myself ~ Walt Whitman
10   20   30   40   50
1
I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

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

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

Creeds and schools in abeyance,
Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy.

2
Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are crowded with
perfumes,
I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it,
The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.

The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the
distillation, it is odorless,
It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it,
I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked,
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.

The smoke of my own breath,
Echoes, ripples, buzz'd whispers, love-root, silk-thread, crotch and
vine,
My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing
of blood and air through my lungs,
The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and
dark-color'd sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn,

The sound of the belch'd words of my voice loos'd to the eddies of
the wind,
A few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching around of arms,
The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag,

The delight alone or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields
and hill-sides,
The feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song of me rising
from bed and meeting the sun.

Have you reckon'd a thousand acres much? have you reckon'd the
earth much?
Have you practis'd so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of
all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions
of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look
through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in
books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.

3
I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the
beginning and the end,
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.

There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.

Urge and urge and urge,
Always the procreant urge of the world.

Out of the dimness opposite equals advance, always substance and
increase, always sex,
Always a knit of identity, always distinction, always a breed of
life.
To elaborate is no avail, learn'd and unlearn'd feel that it is so.

Sure as the most certain sure, plumb in the uprights, well
entretied, braced in the beams,
Stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical,
I and this mystery here we stand.

Clear and sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not
my soul.

Lack one lacks both, and the unseen is proved by the seen,
Till that becomes unseen and receives proof in its turn.

Showing the best and dividing it from the worst age vexes age,
Knowing the perfect fitness and equanimity of things, while they
discuss I am silent, and go bathe and admire myself.

Welcome is every organ and attribute of me, and of any man hearty
and clean,
Not an inch nor a particle of an inch is vile, and none shall be
less familiar than the rest.

I am satisfied - I see, dance, laugh, sing;
As the hugging and loving bed-fellow sleeps at my side through the
night, and withdraws at the peep of the day with stealthy
tread,
Leaving me baskets cover'd with white towels swelling the house with
their plenty,
Shall I postpone my acceptation and realization and scream at my
eyes,
That they turn from gazing after and down the road,
And forthwith cipher and show me to a cent,
Exactly the value of one and exactly the value of two, and which is
ahead?

4
Trippers and askers surround me,
People I meet, the effect upon me of my early life or the ward and
city I live in, or the nation,
The latest dates, discoveries, inventions, societies, authors old
and new,
My dinner, dress, associates, looks, compliments, dues,
The real or fancied indifference of some man or woman I love,
The sickness of one of my folks or of myself, or ill-doing or loss
or lack of money, or depressions or exaltations,
Battles, the horrors of fratricidal war, the fever of doubtful news,
the fitful events;
These come to me days and nights and go from me again,
But they are not the Me myself.

Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,
Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary,
Looks down, is erect, or bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest,
Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next,
Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.

Backward I see in my own days where I sweated through fog with
linguists and contenders,
I have no mockings or arguments, I witness and wait.

5
I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to
you,
And you must not be abased to the other.

Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat,
Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not
even the best,
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.

I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning,
How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn'd over
upon me,
And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue
to my bare-stript heart,
And reach'd till you felt my beard, and reach'd till you held my
feet.

Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass
all the argument of the earth,
And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women
my sisters and lovers,
And that a kelson of the creation is love,
And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,
And brown ants in the little wells beneath them,
And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap'd stones, elder, mullein and
poke-weed.

6
A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more
than he.

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green
stuff woven.

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,
Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see
and remark, and say Whose?

Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the
vegetation.

Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I
receive them the same.

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them,
It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken soon out
of their mothers' laps,
And here you are the mothers' laps.

This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,
Darker than the colorless beards of old men,
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.

O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues,
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for
nothing.

I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and
women,
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken
soon out of their laps.

What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?

They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the
end to arrest it,
And ceas'd the moment life appear'd.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

7
Has any one supposed it lucky to be born?
I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know
it.

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

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

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

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

8
The little one sleeps in its cradle,
I lift the gauze and look a long time, and silently brush away flies
with my hand.

The youngster and the red-faced girl turn aside up the bushy hill,
I peeringly view them from the top.

The suicide sprawls on the bloody floor of the bedroom,
I witness the corpse with its dabbled hair, I note where the pistol
has fallen.

The blab of the pave, tires of carts, sluff of boot-soles, talk of
the promenaders,
The heavy omnibus, the driver with his interrogating thumb, the
clank of the shod horses on the granite floor,
The snow-sleighs, clinking, shouted jokes, pelts of snow-balls,
The hurrahs for popular favorites, the fury of rous'd mobs,
The flap of the curtain'd litter, a sick man inside borne to the
hospital,
The meeting of enemies, the sudden oath, the blows and fall,
The excited crowd, the policeman with his star quickly working his
passage to the centre of the crowd,
The impassive stones that receive and return so many echoes,
What groans of over-fed or half-starv'd who fall sunstruck or in
fits,
What exclamations of women taken suddenly who hurry home and
give birth to babes,
What living and buried speech is always vibrating here, what howls
restrain'd by decorum,
Arrests of criminals, slights, adulterous offers made, acceptances,
rejections with convex lips,
I mind them or the show or resonance of them-I come and I depart.

9
The big doors of the country barn stand open and ready,
The dried grass of the harvest-time loads the slow-drawn wagon,
The clear light plays on the brown gray and green intertinged,
The armfuls are pack'd to the sagging mow.

I am there, I help, I came stretch'd atop of the load,
I felt its soft jolts, one leg reclined on the other,
I jump from the cross-beams and seize the clover and timothy,
And roll head over heels and tangle my hair full of wisps.


Alone far in the wilds and mountains I hunt,
Wandering amazed at my own lightness and glee,
In the late afternoon choosing a safe spot to pass the night,
Kindling a fire and broiling the fresh-kill'd game,
Falling asleep on the gather'd leaves with my dog and gun by my
side.

The Yankee clipper is under her sky-sails, she cuts the sparkle
and scud,
My eyes settle the land, I bend at her prow or shout joyously from
the deck.

The boatmen and clam-diggers arose early and stopt for me,
I tuck'd my trowser-ends in my boots and went and had a good time;
You should have been with us that day round the chowder-kettle.

I saw the marriage of the trapper in the open air in the far west,
the bride was a red girl,
Her father and his friends sat near cross-legged and dumbly smoking,
they had moccasins to their feet and large thick blankets
hanging from their shoulders,
On a bank lounged the trapper, he was drest mostly in skins, his
luxuriant beard and curls protected his neck, he held his bride
by the hand,
She had long eyelashes, her head was bare, her coarse straight locks
descended upon her voluptuous limbs and reach'd to her
feet.

The runaway slave came to my house and stopt outside,
I heard his motions crackling the twigs of the woodpile,
Through the swung half-door of the kitchen I saw him limpsy and
weak,
And went where he sat on a log and led him in and assured him,
And brought water and fill'd a tub for his sweated body and bruis'd
feet,
And gave him a room that enter'd from my own, and gave him some
coarse clean clothes,
And remember perfectly well his revolving eyes and his awkwardness,
And remember putting piasters on the galls of his neck and ankles;
He staid with me a week before he was recuperated and pass'd north,
I had him sit next me at table, my fire-lock lean'd in the corner.

11
Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore,
Twenty-eight young men and all so friendly;
Twenty-eight years of womanly life and all so lonesome.

She owns the fine house by the rise of the bank,
She hides handsome and richly drest aft the blinds of the window.

Which of the young men does she like the best?
Ah the homeliest of them is beautiful to her.

Where are you off to, lady? for I see you,
You splash in the water there, yet stay stock still in your room.

Dancing and laughing along the beach came the twenty-ninth
bather,
The rest did not see her, but she saw them and loved them.

The beards of the young men glisten'd with wet, it ran from their
long hair,
Little streams pass'd all over their bodies.

An unseen hand also pass'd over their bodies,
It descended tremblingly from their temples and ribs.

The young men float on their backs, their white bellies bulge to the
sun, they do not ask who seizes fast to them,
They do not know who puffs and declines with pendant and bending
arch,
They do not think whom they souse with spray.

12
The butcher-boy puts off his killing-clothes, or sharpens his knife
at the stall in the market,
I loiter enjoying his repartee and his shuffle and break-down.

Blacksmiths with grimed and hairy chests environ the anvil,
Each has his main-sledge, they are all out, there is a great heat in
the fire.

From the cinder-strew'd threshold I follow their movements,
The lithe sheer of their waists plays even with their massive arms,
Overhand the hammers swing, overhand so slow, overhand so sure,
They do not hasten, each man hits in his place.

13
The negro holds firmly the reins of his four horses, the block swags
underneath on its tied-over chain,
The negro that drives the long dray of the stone-yard, steady and
tall he stands pois'd on one leg on the string-piece,
His blue shirt exposes his ample neck and breast and loosens over
his hip-band,
His glance is calm and commanding, he tosses the slouch of his hat
away from his forehead,
The sun falls on his crispy hair and mustache, falls on the black of
his polish'd and perfect limbs.

I behold the picturesque giant and love him, and I do not stop
there,
I go with the team also.

In me the caresser of life wherever moving, backward as well as
forward sluing,
To niches aside and junior bending, not a person or object missing,
Absorbing all to myself and for this song.

Oxen that rattle the yoke and chain or halt in the leafy shade, what
is that you express in your eyes?
It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life.

My tread scares the wood-drake and wood-duck on my distant and
day-long ramble,
They rise together, they slowly circle around.

I believe in those wing'd purposes,
And acknowledge red, yellow, white, playing within me,
And consider green and violet and the tufted crown intentional,
And do not call the tortoise unworthy because she is not something
else,
And the in the woods never studied the gamut, yet trills pretty well
to me,
And the look of the bay mare shames silliness out of me.

14
The wild gander leads his flock through the cool night,
Ya-honk he says, and sounds it down to me like an invitation,
The pert may suppose it meaningless, but I listening close,
Find its purpose and place up there toward the wintry sky.

The sharp-hoof'd moose of the north, the cat on the house-sill, the
chickadee, the prairie-dog,
The litter of the grunting sow as they tug at her teats,
The brood of the turkey-hen and she with her half-spread wings,
I see in them and myself the same old law.

The press of my foot to the earth springs a hundred affections,
They scorn the best I can do to relate them.

I am enamour'd of growing out-doors,
Of men that live among cattle or taste of the ocean or woods,
Of the builders and steerers of ships and the wielders of axes and
mauls, and the drivers of horses,
I can eat and sleep with them week in and week out.

What is commonest, cheapest, nearest, easiest, is Me,
Me going in for my chances, spending for vast returns,
Adorning myself to bestow myself on the first that will take me,
Not asking the sky to come down to my good will,
Scattering it freely forever.

15
The pure contralto sings in the organ loft,
The carpenter dresses his plank, the tongue of his foreplane
whistles its wild ascending lisp,
The married and unmarried children ride home to their Thanksgiving
dinner,
The pilot seizes the king-pin, he heaves down with a strong arm,
The mate stands braced in the whale-boat, lance and harpoon are
ready,
The duck-shooter walks by silent and cautious stretches,
The deacons are ordain'd with cross'd hands at the altar,
The spinning-girl retreats and advances to the hum of the big wheel,
The farmer stops by the bars as he walks on a First-day loafe and
looks at the oats and rye,
The lunatic is carried at last to the asylum a confirm'd case,
(He will never sleep any more as he did in the cot in his mother's
bed-room;)
The jour printer with gray head and gaunt jaws works at his case,
He turns his quid of tobacco while his eyes blurr with the
manuscript;
The malform'd limbs are tied to the surgeon's table,
What is removed drops horribly in a pail;
The quadroon girl is sold at the auction-stand, the drunkard nods by
the bar-room stove,
The machinist rolls up his sleeves, the policeman travels his beat,
the gate-keeper marks who pass,
The young fellow drives the express-wagon, (I love him, though I do
not know him;)
The half-breed straps on his light boots to compete in the race,
The western turkey-shooting draws old and young, some lean on their
rifles, some sit on logs,
Out from the crowd steps the marksman, takes his position, levels
his piece;
The groups of newly-come immigrants cover the wharf or levee,
As the woolly-pates hoe in the sugar-field, the overseer views them
from his saddle,
The bugle calls in the ball-room, the gentlemen run for their
partners, the dancers bow to each other,
The youth lies awake in the cedar-roof'd garret and harks to the
musical rain,
The Wolverine sets traps on the creek that helps fill the Huron,
The squaw wrapt in her yellow-hemm'd cloth is offering moccasins and
bead-bags for sale,
The connoisseur peers along the exhibition-gallery with half-shut
eyes bent sideways,
As the deck-hands make fast the steamboat the plank is thrown for
the shore-going passengers,
The young sister holds out the skein while the elder sister winds it
off in a ball, and stops now and then for the knots,
The one-year wife is recovering and happy having a week ago borne
her first child,
The clean-hair'd Yankee girl works with her sewing-machine or in the
factory or mill,
The paving-man leans on his two-handed rammer, the reporter's lead
flies swiftly over the note-book, the sign-painter is lettering
with blue and gold,
The canal boy trots on the tow-path, the book-keeper counts at his
desk, the shoemaker waxes his thread,
The conductor beats time for the band and all the performers follow
him,
The child is baptized, the convert is making his first professions,
The regatta is spread on the bay, the race is begun, (how the white
sails sparkle!)
The drover watching his drove sings out to them that would stray,
The pedler sweats with his pack on his back, (the purchaser higgling
about the odd cent;)
The bride unrumples her white dress, the minute-hand of the clock
moves slowly,
The opium-eater reclines with rigid head and just-open'd lips,
The prostitute draggles her shawl, her bonnet bobs on her tipsy and
pimpled neck,
The crowd laugh at her blackguard oaths, the men jeer and wink to
each other,
(Miserable! I do not laugh at your oaths nor jeer you;)
The President holding a cabinet council is surrounded by the great
Secretaries,
On the piazza walk three matrons stately and friendly with twined
arms,
The crew of the fish-smack pack repeated layers of halibut in the
hold,
The Missourian crosses the plains toting his wares and his cattle,
As the fare-collector goes through the train he gives notice by the
jingling of loose change,
The floor-men are laying the floor, the tinners are tinning the
roof, the masons are calling for mortar,
In single file each shouldering his hod pass onward the laborers;
Seasons pursuing each other the indescribable crowd is gather'd, it
is the fourth of Seventh-month, (what salutes of cannon and
small arms!)
Seasons pursuing each other the plougher ploughs, the mower mows,
and the winter-grain falls in the ground;
Off on the lakes the pike-fisher watches and waits by the hole in
the frozen surface,
The stumps stand thick round the clearing, the squatter strikes deep
with his axe,
Flatboatmen make fast towards dusk near the cotton-wood or
pecan-trees,
Coon-seekers go through the regions of the Red river or through
those drain'd by the Tennessee, or through those of the Arkansas,
Torches shine in the dark that hangs on the Chattahooche or
Altamahaw,
Patriarchs sit at supper with sons and grandsons and great-grandsons
around them,
In walls of adobie, in canvas tents, rest hunters and trappers after
their day's sport,
The city sleeps and the country sleeps,
The living sleep for their time, the dead sleep for their time,
The old husband sleeps by his wife and the young husband sleeps by
his wife;
And these tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them,
And such as it is to be of these more or less I am,
And of these one and all I weave the song of myself.

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

I resist any thing better than my own diversity,
Breathe the air but leave plenty after me,

And am not stuck up, and am in my place.

(The moth and the fish-eggs are in their place,
The bright suns I see and the dark suns I cannot see are in their
place,
The palpable is in its place and the impalpable is in its place.)

17
These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they
are not original with me,
If they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing, or next to
nothing,
If they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle they are
nothing,
If they are not just as close as they are distant they are nothing.

This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the water is,
This the common air that bathes the globe.

18
With music strong I come, with my cornets and my drums,
I play not marches for accepted victors only, I play marches for
conquer'd and slain persons.

Have you heard that it was good to gain the day?
I also say it is good to fall, battles are lost in the same spirit
in which they are won.

I beat and pound for the dead,
I blow through my embouchures my loudest and gayest for them.

Vivas to those who have fail'd!
And to those whose war-vessels sank in the sea!
And to those themselves who sank in the sea!
And to all generals that lost engagements, and all overcome heroes!
And the numberless unknown heroes equal to the greatest heroes
known!

19
This is the meal equally set, this the meat for natural hunger,
It is for the wicked just same as the righteous, I make appointments
with all,
I will not have a single person slighted or left away,
The kept-woman, sponger, thief, are hereby invited,
The heavy-lipp'd slave is invited, the venerealee is invited;
There shall be no difference between them and the rest.

This is the press of a bashful hand, this the float and odor of
hair,
This the touch of my lips to yours, this the murmur of yearning,
This the far-off depth and height reflecting my own face,
This the thoughtful merge of myself, and the outlet again.

Do you guess I have some intricate purpose?
Well I have, for the Fourth-month showers have, and the mica on the
side of a rock has.

Do you take it I would astonish?
Does the daylight astonish? does the early redstart twittering
through the woods?
Do I astonish more than they?

This hour I tell things in confidence,
I might not tell everybody, but I will tell you.


Who goes there? hankering, gross, mystical, nude;
How is it I extract strength from the beef I eat?


What is a man anyhow? what am I? what are you?

All I mark as my own you shall offset it with your own,
Else it were time lost listening to me.

I do not snivel that snivel the world over,
That months are vacuums and the ground but wallow and filth.

Whimpering and truckling fold with powders for invalids, conformity
goes to the fourth-remov'd,
I wear my hat as I please indoors or out.

Why should I pray? why should I venerate and be ceremonious?

Having pried through the strata, analyzed to a hair, counsel'd with
doctors and calculated close,
I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones.

In all people I see myself, none more and not one a barley-corn
less,
And the good or bad I say of myself I say of them.

I know I am solid and sound,
To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow,
All are written to me, and I must get what the writing means.

I know I am deathless,
I know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by a carpenter's compass,
I know I shall not pass like a child's carlacue cut with a burnt
stick at night.

I know I am august,
I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood,
I see that the elementary laws never apologize,
(I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I plant my house by,
after all.)

I exist as I am, that is enough,
If no other in the world be aware I sit content,
And if each and all be aware I sit content.

One world is aware and by far the largest to me, and that is myself,
And whether I come to my own to-day or in ten thousand or ten
million years,
I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait.

My foothold is tenon'd and mortis'd in granite,
I laugh at what you call dissolution,
And I know the amplitude of time.

21
I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul,
The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with
me,
The first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I translate
into new tongue.

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

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

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

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

Press close bare-bosom'd night - press close magnetic nourishing
night!
Night of south winds - night of the large few stars!

Still nodding night - mad naked summer night.

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

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

22
You sea! I resign myself to you also - I guess what you mean,
I behold from the beach your crooked fingers,
I believe you refuse to go back without feeling of me,
We must have a turn together, I undress, hurry me out of sight of
the land,
Cushion me soft, rock me in billowy drowse,
Dash me with amorous wet, I can repay you.

Sea of stretch'd ground-swells,
Sea breathing broad and convulsive breaths,
Sea of the brine of life and of unshovell'd yet always-ready graves,
Howler and scooper of storms, capricious and dainty sea,
I am integral with you, I too am of one phase and of all phases.

Partaker of influx and efflux I, extoller of hate and conciliation,
Extoller of amies and those that sleep in each others' arms.

I am he attesting sympathy,
(Shall I make my list of things in the house and skip the house that
supports them?)

I am not the poet of goodness only, I do not decline to be the poet
of wickedness also.

What blurt is this about virtue and about vice?
Evil propels me and reform of evil propels me, I stand indifferent,
My gait is no fault-finder's or rejecter's gait,
I moisten the roots of all that has grown.

Did you fear some scrofula out of the unflagging pregnancy?
Did you guess the celestial laws are yet to be work'd over and
rectified?

I find one side a balance and the antipedal side a balance,
Soft doctrine as steady help as stable doctrine,
Thoughts and deeds of the present our rouse and early start.

This minute that comes to me over the past decillions,
There is no better than it and now.

What behaved well in the past or behaves well to-day is not such
wonder,
The wonder is always and always how there can be a mean man or an
infidel.

23
Endless unfolding of words of ages!
And mine a word of the modern, the word En-Masse.

A word of the faith that never balks,
Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time
absolutely.

It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all,
That mystic baffling wonder alone completes all.

I accept Reality and dare not question it,
Materialism first and last imbuing.

Hurrah for positive science! long live exact demonstration!
Fetch stonecrop mixt with cedar and branches of lilac,
This is the lexicographer, this the chemist, this made a grammar of
the old cartouches,
These mariners put the ship through dangerous unknown seas.
This is the geologist, this works with the scalper, and this is a
mathematician.

Gentlemen, to you the first honors always!
Your facts are useful, and yet they are not my dwelling,
I but enter by them to an area of my dwelling.

Less the reminders of properties told my words,
And more the reminders they of life untold, and of freedom and
extrication,
And make short account of neuters and geldings, and favor men and
women fully equipt,
And beat the gong of revolt, and stop with fugitives and them that
plot and conspire.

24
Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son,
Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding,
No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from
them,
No more modest than immodest.

Unscrew the locks from the doors!
Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!

Whoever degrades another degrades me,
And whatever is done or said returns at last to me.

Through me the afflatus surging and surging, through me the current
and index.

I speak the pass-word primeval, I give the sign of democracy,
By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their
counterpart of on the same terms.

Through me many long dumb voices,
Voices of the interminable generations of prisoners and slaves,
Voices of the diseas'd and despairing and of thieves and dwarfs,
Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion,
And of the threads that connect the stars, and of wombs and of the
father-stuff,
And of the rights of them the others are down upon,
Of the deform'd, trivial, flat, foolish, despised,
Fog in the air, beetles rolling balls of dung.

Through me forbidden voices,
Voices of sexes and lusts, voices veil'd and I remove the veil,
Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigur'd.

I do not press my fingers across my mouth,
I keep as delicate around the bowels as around the head and
heart,
Copulation is no more rank to me than death is.

I believe in the flesh and the appetites,
Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me
is a miracle.

Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am
touch'd from,
The scent of these arm-pits aroma finer than prayer,
This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds.

If I worship one thing more than another it shall be the spread of
my own body, or any part of it,
Translucent mould of me it shall be you!
Shaded ledges and rests it shall be you!
Firm masculine colter it shall be you!
Whatever goes to the tilth of me it shall be you!
You my rich blood! your milky stream pale strippings of my life!
Breast that presses against other breasts it shall be you!
My brain it shall be your occult convolutions!
Root of wash'd sweet-flag! timorous pond-snipe! nest of guarded
duplicate eggs! it shall be you!
Mix'd tussled hay of head, beard, brawn, it shall be you!
Trickling sap of maple, fibre of manly wheat, it shall be you!
Sun so generous it shall be you!
Vapors lighting and shading my face it shall be you!
You sweaty brooks and dews it shall be you!
Winds whose soft-tickling genitals rub against me it shall be you!
Broad muscular fields, branches of live oak, loving lounger in my
winding paths, it shall be you!
Hands I have taken, face I have kiss'd, mortal I have ever touch'd,
it shall be you.

I dote on myself, there is that lot of me and all so luscious,
Each moment and whatever happens thrills me with joy,
I cannot tell how my ankles bend, nor whence the cause of my
faintest wish,
Nor the cause of the friendship I emit, nor the cause of the
friendship I take again.

That I walk up my stoop, I pause to consider if it really be,
A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics
of books.

To behold the day-break!
The little light fades the immense and diaphanous shadows,
The air tastes good to my palate.

Hefts of the moving world at innocent gambols silently rising
freshly exuding,
Scooting obliquely high and low.

Something I cannot see puts upward libidinous prongs,
Seas of bright juice suffuse heaven.

The earth by the sky staid with, the daily close of their junction,
The heav'd challenge from the east that moment over my head,
The mocking taunt, See then whether you shall be master!

25
Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sun-rise would kill me,
If I could not now and always send sun-rise out of me.

We also ascend dazzling and tremendous as the sun,
We found our own O my soul in the calm and cool of the daybreak.

My voice goes after what my eyes cannot reach,
With the twirl of my tongue I encompass worlds and volumes of
worlds.

Speech is the twin of my vision, it is unequal to measure itself,
It provokes me forever, it says sarcastically,
Walt you contain enough, why don't you let it out then?

Come now I will not be tantalized, you conceive too much of
articulation,
Do you not know O speech how the buds beneath you are folded?
Waiting in gloom, protected by frost,
The dirt receding before my prophetical screams,
I underlying causes to balance them at last,
My knowledge my live parts, it keeping tally with the meaning of all
things,
Happiness, (which whoever hears me let him or her set out in search
of this day.)

My final merit I refuse you, I refuse putting from me what I really
am,
Encompass worlds, but never try to encompass me,
I crowd your sleekest and best by simply looking toward you.

Writing and talk do not prove me,
I carry the plenum of proof and every thing else in my face,
With the hush of my lips I wholly confound the skeptic.

26
Now I will do nothing but listen,
To accrue what I hear into this song, to let sounds contribute
toward it.

I hear bravuras of birds, bustle of growing wheat, gossip of flames,

clack of sticks cooking my meals,
I hear the sound I love, the sound of the human voice,
I hear all sounds running together, combined, fused or following,
Sounds of the city and sounds out of the city, sounds of the day and
night,
Talkative young ones to those that like them, the loud laugh of
work-people at their meals,
The angry base of disjointed friendship, the faint tones of the
sick,
The judge with hands tight to the desk, his pallid lips pronouncing
a death-sentence,
The heave'e'yo of stevedores unlading ships by the wharves, the
refrain of the anchor-lifters,
The ring of alarm-bells, the cry of fire, the whirr of
swift-streaking engines and hose-carts with premonitory tinkles
and color'd lights,
The steam-whistle, the solid roll of the train of approaching cars,
The slow march play'd at the head of the association marching two
and two,
(They go to guard some corpse, the flag-tops are draped with black
muslin.)

I hear the violoncello, ('tis the young man's heart's complaint,)
I hear the key'd cornet, it glides quickly in through my ears,
It shakes mad-sweet pangs through my belly and breast.

I hear the chorus, it is a grand opera,
Ah this indeed is music - this suits me.

A tenor large and fresh as the creation fills me,
The orbic flex of his mouth is pouring and filling me full.

I hear the train'd soprano (what work with hers is this?)
The orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies,
It wrenches such ardors from me I did not know I possess'd them,
It sails me, I dab with bare feet, they are lick'd by the indolent
waves,
I am cut by bitter and angry hail, I lose my breath,
Steep'd amid honey'd morphine, my windpipe throttled in fakes of
death,
At length let up again to feel the puzzle of puzzles,
And that we call Being.

27
To be in any form, what is that?
(Round and round we go, all of us, and ever come back thither,)
If nothing lay more develop'd the quahaug in its callous shell were
enough.

Mine is no callous shell,
I have instant conductors all over me whether I pass or stop,
They seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me.

I merely stir, press, feel with my fingers, and am happy,
To touch my person to some one else's is about as much as I can
stand.

28
Is this then a touch? quivering me to a new identity,
Flames and ether making a rush for my veins,
Treacherous tip of me reaching and crowding to help them,
My flesh and blood playing out lightning to strike what is hardly
different from myself,
On all sides prurient provokers stiffening my limbs,
Straining the udder of my heart for its withheld drip,
Behaving licentious toward me, taking no denial,
Depriving me of my best as for a purpose,
Unbuttoning my clothes, holding me by the bare waist,
Deluding my confusion with the calm of the sunlight and
pasture-fields,
Immodestly sliding the fellow-senses away,
They bribed to swap off with touch and go and graze at the edges of
me,
No consideration, no regard for my draining strength or my anger,
Fetching the rest of the herd around to enjoy them a while,
Then all uniting to stand on a headland and worry me.

The sentries desert every other part of me,
They have left me helpless to a red marauder,
They all come to the headland to witness and assist against me.

I am given up by traitors,
I talk wildly, I have lost my wits, I and nobody else am the
greatest traitor,
I went myself first to the headland, my own hands carried me there.

You villain touch! what are you doing? my breath is tight in its
throat,
Unclench your floodgates, you are too much for me.

29
Blind loving wrestling touch, sheath'd hooded sharp-tooth'd touch!
Did it make you ache so, leaving me?

Parting track'd by arriving, perpetual payment of perpetual loan,
Rich showering rain, and recompense richer afterward.

Sprouts take and accumulate, stand by the curb prolific and vital,
Landscapes projected masculine, full-sized and golden.


All truths wait in all things,
They neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it,
They do not need the obstetric forceps of the surgeon,
The insignificant is as big to me as any,
(What is less or more than a touch?)

Logic and sermons never convince,
The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul.

(Only what proves itself to every man and woman is so,
Only what nobody denies is so.)

A minute and a drop of me settle my brain,
I believe the soggy clods shall become lovers and lamps,
And a compend of compends is the meat of a man or woman,
And a summit and flower there is the feeling they have for each
other,
And they are to branch boundlessly out of that lesson until it
becomes omnific,
And until one and all shall delight us, and we them.

31
I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the
stars,
And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg
of the wren,
And the tree-toad is a chef-d'oeuvre for the highest,
And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven,
And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery,
And the cow crunching with depress'd head surpasses any statue,
And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.

I find I incorporate gneiss, coal, long-threaded moss, fruits,
grains, esculent roots,
And am stucco'd with quadrupeds and birds all over,
And have distanced what is behind me for good reasons,
But call any thing back again when I desire it.

In vain the speeding or shyness,
In vain the plutonic rocks send their old heat against my approach,
In vain the mastodon retreats beneath its own powder'd bones,
In vain objects stand leagues off and assume manifold shapes,
In vain the ocean settling in hollows and the great monsters lying
low,
In vain the buzzard houses herself with the sky,
In vain the snake slides through the creepers and logs,
In vain the elk takes to the inner passes of the woods,
In vain the razor-bill'd auk sails far north to Labrador,
I follow quickly, I ascend to the nest in the fissure of the cliff.

32
I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and
self-contain'd,
I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of
owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of
years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.

So they show their relations to me and I accept them,
They bring me tokens of myself, they evince them plainly in their
possession.

I wonder where they get those tokens,
Did I pass that way huge times ago and negligently drop them?

Myself moving forward then and now and forever,
Gathering and showing more always and with velocity,
Infinite and omnigenous, and the like of these among them,
Not too exclusive toward the reachers of my remembrancers,
Picking out here one that I love, and now go with him on brotherly
terms.

A gigantic beauty of a stallion, fresh and responsive to my
caresses,
Head high in the forehead, wide between the ears,
Limbs glossy and supple, tail dusting the ground,
Eyes full of sparkling wickedness, ears finely cut, flexibly moving.

His nostrils dilate as my heels embrace him,
His well-built limbs tremble with pleasure as we race around and
return.

I but use you a minute, then I resign you, stallion,
Why do I need your paces when I myself out-gallop them?
Even as I stand or sit passing faster than you.

33
Space and Time! now I see it is true, what I guess'd at,
What I guess'd when I loaf'd on the grass,
What I guess'd while I lay alone in my bed,
And again as I walk'd the beach under the paling stars of the
morning.

My ties and ballasts leave me, my elbows rest in sea-gaps,
I skirt sierras, my palms cover continents,
I am afoot with my vision.

By the city's quadrangular houses - in log huts, camping with
lumber-men,
Along the ruts of the turnpike, along the dry gulch and rivulet bed,
Weeding my onion-patch or hosing rows of carrots and parsnips,
crossing savannas, trailing in forests,
Prospecting, gold-digging, girdling the trees of a new purchase,
Scorch'd ankle-deep by the hot sand, hauling my boat down the
shallow river,
Where the panther walks to and fro on a limb overhead, where the
buck turns furiously at the hunter,
Where the rattlesnake suns his flabby length on a rock, where the
otter is feeding on fish,
Where the alligator in his tough pimples sleeps by the bayou,
Where the black bear is searching for roots or honey, where the
beaver pats the mud with his paddle-shaped tall;
Over the growing sugar, over the yellow-flower'd cotton plant, over
the rice in its low moist field,
Over the sharp-peak'd farm house, with its scallop'd scum and
slender shoots from the gutters,
Over the western persimmon, over the long-leav'd corn, over the
delicate blue-flower flax,
Over the white and brown buckwheat, a hummer and buzzer there with
the rest,
Over the dusky green of the rye as it ripples and shades in the
breeze;
Scaling mountains, pulling myself cautiously up, holding on by low
scragged limbs,
Walking the path worn in the grass and beat through the leaves of
the brush,
Where the quail is whistling betwixt the woods and the wheat-lot,
Where the bat flies in the Seventh-month eve, where the great
goldbug drops through the dark,
Where the brook puts out of the roots of the old tree and flows to
the meadow,
Where cattle stand and shake away flies with the tremulous
shuddering of their hides,
Where the cheese-cloth hangs in the kitchen, where andirons straddle
the hearth-slab, where cobwebs fall in festoons from the rafters;
Where trip-hammers crash, where the press is whirling its cylinders,
Wherever the human heart beats with terrible throes under its ribs,
Where the pear-shaped balloon is floating aloft, (floating in it
myself and looking composedly down,)
Where the life-car is drawn on the slip-noose, where the heat
hatches pale-green eggs in the dented sand,
Where the she-whale swims with her calf and never forsakes it,
Where the steam-ship trails hind-ways its long pennant of smoke,
Where the fin of the shark cuts like a black chip out of the water,
Where the half-burn'd brig is riding on unknown currents,
Where shells grow to her slimy deck, where the dead are corrupting
below;
Where the dense-starr'd flag is borne at the head of the regiments,
Approaching Manhattan up by the long-stretching island,
Under Niagara, the cataract falling like a veil over my countenance,
Upon a door-step, upon the horse-block of hard wood outside,
Upon the race-course, or enjoying picnics or jigs or a good game of
base-ball,
At he-festivals, with blackguard gibes, ironical license,
bull-dances, drinking, laughter,
At the cider-mill tasting the sweets of the brown mash, sucking the
juice through a straw,
At apple-peelings wanting kisses for all the red fruit I find,
At musters, beach-parties, friendly bees, huskings, house-raisings;

Where the mocking-bird sounds his delicious gurgles, cackles,
screams, weeps,
Where the hay-rick stands in the barn-yard, where the dry-stalks are
scatter'd, where the brood-cow waits in the hovel,
Where the bull advances to do his masculine work, where the stud to
the mare, where the cock is treading the hen,
Where the heifers browse, where geese nip their food with short
jerks,
Where sun-down shadows lengthen over the limitless and lonesome
prairie,
Where herds of buffalo make a crawling spread of the square miles
far and near,
Where the humming-bird shimmers, where the neck of the long-lived
swan is curving and winding,
Where the laughing-gull scoots by the shore, where she laughs her
near-human laugh,
Where bee-hives range on a gray bench in the garden half hid by the
high weeds,
Where band-neck'd partridges roost in a ring on the ground with
their heads out,
Where burial coaches enter the arch'd gates of a cemetery,
Where winter wolves bark amid wastes of snow and icicled trees,
Where the yellow-crown'd heron comes to the edge of the marsh at
night and feeds upon small crabs,
Where the splash of swimmers and divers cools the warm noon,
Where the katy-did works her chromatic reed on the walnut-tree over
the well,
Through patches of citrons and cucumbers with silver-wired leaves,
Through the salt-lick or orange glade, or under conical firs,
Through the gymnasium, through the curtain'd saloon, through the
office or public hall;
Pleas'd with the native and pleas'd with the foreign, pleas'd with
the new and old,
Pleas'd with the homely woman as well as the handsome,
Pleas'd with the quakeress as she puts off her bonnet and talks
melodiously,
Pleas'd with the tune of the choir of the whitewash'd church,
Pleas'd with the earnest words of the sweating Methodist preacher,
impress'd seriously at the camp-meeting;
Looking in at the shop-windows of Broadway the whole forenoon,
flatting the flesh of my nose on the thick plate glass,
Wandering the same afternoon with my face turn'd up to the clouds,
or down a lane or along the beach,
My right and left arms round the sides of two friends, and I in the
middle;
Coming home with the silent and dark-cheek'd bush-boy, (behind me
he rides at the drape of the day,)
Far from the settlements studying the print of animals' feet, or the
moccasin print,
By the cot in the hospital reaching lemonade to a feverish patient,
Nigh the coffin'd corpse when all is still, examining with a candle;
Voyaging to every port to dicker and adventure,
Hurrying with the modern crowd as eager and fickle as any,
Hot toward one I hate, ready in my madness to knife him,
Solitary at midnight in my back yard, my thoughts gone from me a
long while,
Walking the old hills of Judaea with the beautiful gentle God by my
side,
Speeding through space, speeding through heaven and the stars,
Speeding amid the seven satellites and the broad ring, and the
diameter of eighty thousand miles,
Speeding with tail'd meteors, throwing fire-balls like the rest,
Carrying the crescent child that carries its own full mother in its
belly,
Storming, enjoying, planning, loving, cautioning,
Backing and filling, appearing and disappearing,
I tread day and night such roads.

I visit the orchards of spheres and look at the product,
And look at quintillions ripen'd and look at quintillions green.

I fly those flights of a fluid and swallowing soul,
My course runs below the soundings of plummets.

I help myself to material and immaterial,
No guard can shut me off, no law prevent me.

I anchor my ship for a little while only,
My messengers continually cruise away or bring their returns to me.

I go hunting polar furs and the seal, leaping chasms with a
pike-pointed staff, clinging to topples of brittle and blue.

I ascend to the foretruck,
I take my place late at night in the crow's-nest,
We sail the arctic sea, it is plenty light enough,
Through the clear atmosphere I stretch around on the wonderful
beauty,
The enormous masses of ice pass me and I pass them, the scenery is
plain in all directions,
The white-topt mountains show in the distance, I fling out my
fancies toward them,
We are approaching some great battle-field in which we are soon to
be engaged,
We pass the colossal outposts of the encampment, we pass with still
feet and caution,
Or we are entering by the suburbs some vast and ruin'd city,
The blocks and fallen architecture more than all the living cities
of the globe.

I am a free companion, I bivouac by invading watchfires,
I turn the bridgroom out of bed and stay with the bride myself,
I tighten her all night to my thighs and lips.

My voice is the wife's voice, the screech by the rail of the stairs,
They fetch my man's body up dripping and drown'd.

I understand the large hearts of heroes,
The courage of present times and all times,
How the skipper saw the crowded and rudderless wreck of the
steamship, and Death chasing it up and down the storm,
How he knuckled tight and gave not back an inch, and was faithful of
days and faithful of nights,
And chalk'd in large letters on a board, Be of good cheer, we will
not desert you;
How he follow'd with them and tack'd with them three days and
would not give it up,
How he saved the drifting company at last,
How the lank loose-gown'd women look'd when boated from the
side of their prepared graves,
How the silent old-faced infants and the lifted sick, and the
sharp-lipp'd unshaved men;
All this I swallow, it tastes good, I like it well, it becomes mine,
I am the man, I suffer'd, I was there.

The disdain and calmness of martyrs,
The mother of old, condemn'd for a witch, burnt with dry wood, her
children gazing on,
The hounded slave that flags in the race, leans by the fence,
blowing, cover'd with sweat,
The twinges that sting like needles his legs and neck, the murderous
buckshot and the bullets,
All these I feel or am.

I am the hounded slave, I wince at the bite of the dogs,
Hell and despair are upon me, crack and again crack the marksmen,
I clutch the rails of the fence, my gore dribs, thinn'd with the
ooze of my skin,
I fall on the weeds and stones,
The riders spur their unwilling horses, haul close,
Taunt my dizzy ears and beat me violently over the head with
whip-stocks.

Agonies are one of my changes of garments,
I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the
wounded person,

My hurts turn livid upon me as I lean on a cane and observe.

I am the mash'd fireman with breast-bone broken,
Tumbling walls buried me in their debris,
Heat and smoke I inspired, I heard the yelling shouts of my
comrades,
I heard the distant click of their picks and shovels,
They have clear'd the beams away, they tenderly lift me forth.

I lie in the night air in my red shirt, the pervading hush is for my
sake,
Painless after all I lie exhausted but not so unhappy,
White and beautiful are the faces around me, the heads are bared
of their fire-caps,
The kneeling crowd fades with the light of the torches.

Distant and dead resuscitate,
They show as the dial or move as the hands of me, I am the clock
myself.

I am an old artillerist, I tell of my fort's bombardment,
I am there again.

Again the long roll of the drummers,
Again the attacking cannon, mortars,
Again to my listening ears the cannon responsive.

I take part, I see and hear the whole,
The cries, curses, roar, the plaudits for well-aim'd shots,
The ambulanza slowly passing trailing its red drip,
Workmen searching after damages, making indispensable repairs,
The fall of grenades through the rent roof, the fan-shaped
explosion,
The whizz of limbs, heads, stone, wood, iron, high in the air.

Again gurgles the mouth of my dying general, he furiously waves
with his hand,
He gasps through the clot Mind not me - mind - the entrenchments.

34
Now I tell what I knew in Texas in my early youth,
(I tell not the fall of Alamo,
Not one escaped to tell the fall of Alamo,
The hundred and fifty are dumb yet at Alamo,)
'Tis the tale of the murder in cold blood of four hundred and twelve
young men.

Retreating they had form'd in a hollow square with their baggage for
breastworks,
Nine hundred lives out of the surrounding enemies, nine times their
number, was the price they took in advance,
Their colonel was wounded and their ammunition gone,
They treated for an honorable capitulation, receiv'd writing and
seal, gave up their arms and march'd back prisoners of war.

They were the glory of the race of rangers,
Matchless with horse, rifle, song, supper, courtship,
Large, turbulent, generous, handsome, proud, and affectionate,
Bearded, sunburnt, drest in the free costume of hunters,
Not a single one over thirty years of age.

The second First-day morning they were brought out in squads and
massacred, it was beautiful early summer,
The work commenced about five o'clock and was over by eight.

None obey'd the command to kneel,
Some made a mad and helpless rush, some stood stark and straight,
A few fell at once, shot in the temple or heart, the living and dead
lay together,
The maim'd and mangled dug in the dirt, the new-comers saw them
there,
Some half-kill'd attempted to crawl away,
These were despatch'd with bayonets or batter'd with the blunts of
muskets,
A youth not seventeen years old seiz'd his assassin till two more
came to release him,
The three were all torn and cover'd with the boy's blood.

At eleven o'clock began the burning of the bodies;
That is the tale of the murder of the four hundred and twelve young
men.

35
Would you hear of an old-time sea-fight?
Would you learn who won by the light of the moon and stars?
List to the yarn, as my grandmother's father the sailor told it to
me.

Our foe was no sulk in his ship I tell you, (said he,)
His was the surly English pluck, and there is no tougher or truer,
and never was, and never will be;
Along the lower'd eve he came horribly raking us.

We closed with him, the yards entangled, the cannon touch'd,
My captain lash'd fast with his own hands.

We had receiv'd some eighteen pound shots under the water,
On our lower-gun-deck two large pieces had burst at the first fire,
killing all around and blowing up overhead.

Fighting at sun-down, fighting at dark,
Ten o'clock at night, the full moon well up, our leaks on the gain,
and five feet of water reported,
The master-at-arms loosing the prisoners confined in the after-hold
to give them a chance for themselves.

The transit to and from the magazine is now stopt by the sentinels,
They see so many strange faces they do not know whom to trust.

Our frigate takes fire,
The other asks if we demand quarter?
If our colors are struck and the fighting done?

Now I laugh content, for I hear the voice of my little captain,
We have not struck, he composedly cries, we have just begun our part
of the fighting.

Only three guns are in use,
One is directed by the captain himself against the enemy's
main-mast,
Two well serv'd with grape and canister silence his musketry and
clear his decks.

The tops alone second the fire of this little battery, especially
the main-top,
They hold out bravely during the whole of the action.

Not a moment's cease,
The leaks gain fast on the pumps, the fire eats toward the
powder-magazine.

One of the pumps has been shot away, it is generally thought we are
sinking.

Serene stands the little captain,
He is not hurried, his voice is neither high nor low,
His eyes give more light to us than our battle-lanterns.

Toward twelve there in the beams of the moon they surrender to us.

36
Stretch'd and still lies the midnight,
Two great hulls motionless on the breast of the darkness,
Our vessel riddled and slowly sinking, preparations to pass to the
one we have conquer'd,
The captain on the quarter-deck coldly giving his orders through a
countenance white as a sheet,
Near by the corpse of the child that serv'd in the cabin,
The dead face of an old salt with long white hair and carefully
curl'd whiskers,
The flames spite of all that can be done flickering aloft and below,
The husky voices of the two or three officers yet fit for duty,
Formless stacks of bodies and bodies by themselves, dabs of flesh
upon the masts and spars,
Cut of cordage, dangle of rigging, slight shock of the soothe of
waves,
Black and impassive guns, litter of powder-parcels, strong scent,
A few large stars overhead, silent and mournful shining,
Delicate sniffs of sea-breeze, smells of sedgy grass and fields by
the shore, death-messages given in charge to survivors,
The hiss of the surgeon's knife, the gnawing teeth of his saw,
Wheeze, cluck, swash of falling blood, short wild scream, and long,
dull, tapering groan,
These so, these irretrievable.

37
You laggards there on guard! look to your arms!
In at the conquer'd doors they crowd! I am possess'd!
Embody all presences outlaw'd or suffering,
See myself in prison shaped like another man,
And feel the dull unintermitted pain.

For me the keepers of convicts shoulder their carbines and keep
watch,
It is I let out in the morning and barr'd at night.

Not a mutineer walks handcuff'd to jail but I am handcuff'd to him
and walk by his side,
(I am less the jolly one there, and more the silent one with sweat
on my twitching lips.)

Not a youngster is taken for larceny but I go up too, and am tried
and sentenced.

Not a cholera patient lies at the last gasp but I also lie at the
last gasp,
My face is ash-color'd, my sinews gnarl, away from me people
retreat.

Askers embody themselves in me and I am embodied in them,
I project my hat, sit shame-faced, and beg.

38
Enough! enough! enough!
Somehow I have been stunn'd. Stand back!
Give me a little time beyond my cuff'd head, slumbers, dreams,
gaping,
I discover myself on the verge of a usual mistake.

That I could forget the mockers and insults!
That I could forget the trickling tears and the blows of the
bludgeons and hammers!
That I could look with a separate look on my own crucifixion and
bloody crowning.

I remember now,
I resume the overstaid fraction,
The grave of rock multiplies what has been confided to it, or to any
graves,
Corpses rise, gashes heal, fastenings roll from me.

I troop forth replenish'd with supreme power, one of an average
unending procession,
Inland and sea-coast we go, and pass all boundary lines,
Our swift ordinances on their way over the whole earth,
The blossoms we wear in our hats the growth of thousands of years.

Eleves, I salute you! come forward!
Continue your annotations, continue your questionings.

39
The friendly and flowing savage, who is he?
Is he waiting for civilization, or past it and mastering it?

Is he some Southwesterner rais'd out-doors? is he Kanadian?
Is he from the Mississippi country? Iowa, Oregon, California?
The mountains? prairie-life, bush-life? or sailor from the sea?

Wherever he goes men and women accept and desire him,
They desire he should like them, touch them, speak to them, stay
with them.

Behavior lawless as snow-flakes, words simple as grass, uncomb'd
head, laughter, and naivete,
Slow-stepping feet, common features, common modes and emanations,
They descend in new forms from the tips of his fingers,
They are waited with the odor of his body or breath, they fly out of
the glance of his eyes.


Flaunt of the sunshine I need not your bask - lie over!
You light surfaces only, I force surfaces and depths also.

Earth! you seem to look for something at my hands,
Say, old top-knot, what do you want?

Man or woman, I might tell how I like you, but cannot,
And might tell what it is in me and what it is in you, but cannot,
And might tell that pining I have, that pulse of my nights and
days.

Behold, I do not give lectures or a little charity,
When I give I give myself.

You there, impotent, loose in the knees,
Open your scarf'd chops till I blow grit within you,
Spread your palms and lift the flaps of your pockets,
I am not to be denied, I compel, I have stores plenty and to spare,
And any thing I have I bestow.

I do not ask who you are, that is not important to me,
You can do nothing and be nothing but what I will infold you.

To cotton-field drudge or cleaner of privies I lean,
On his right cheek I put the family kiss,
And in my soul I swear I never will deny him.

On women fit for conception I start bigger and nimbler babes.
(This day I am jetting the stuff of far more arrogant republics.)

To any one dying, thither I speed and twist the knob of the door.
Turn the bed-clothes toward the foot of the bed,
Let the physician and the priest go home.

I seize the descending man and raise him with resistless will,
O despairer, here is my neck,
By God, you shall not go down! hang your whole weight upon me.

I dilate you with tremendous breath, I buoy you up,
Every room of the house do I fill with an arm'd force,
Lovers of me, bafflers of graves.

Sleep - I and they keep guard all night,
Not doubt, not decease shall dare to lay finger upon you,
I have embraced you, and henceforth possess you to myself,
And when you rise in the morning you will find what I tell you is
so.

41
I am he bringing help for the sick as they pant on their backs,
And for strong upright men I bring yet more needed help.

I heard what was said of the universe,
Heard it and heard it of several thousand years;
It is middling well as far as it goes - but is that all?

Magnifying and applying come I,
Outbidding at the start the old cautious hucksters,
Taking myself the exact dimensions of Jehovah,
Lithographing Kronos, Zeus his son, and Hercules his grandson,
Buying drafts of Osiris, Isis, Belus, Brahma, Buddha,
In my portfolio placing Manito loose, Allah on a leaf, the crucifix
engraved,
With Odin and the hideous-faced Mexitli and every idol and image,
Taking them all for what they are worth and not a cent more,
Admitting they were alive and did the work of their days,
(They bore mites as for unfledg'd birds who have now to rise and fly
and sing for themselves,)
Accepting the rough deific sketches to fill out better in myself,
bestowing them freely on each man and woman I see,
Discovering as much or more in a framer framing a house,
Putting higher claims for him there with his roll'd-up sleeves
driving the mallet and chisel,
Not objecting to special revelations, considering a curl of smoke or
a hair on the back of my hand just as curious as any revelation,
Lads ahold of fire-engines and hook-and-ladder ropes no less to me
than the gods of the antique wars,
Minding their voices peal through the crash of destruction,
Their brawny limbs passing safe over charr'd laths, their white
foreheads whole and unhurt out of the flames;
By the mechanic's wife with her babe at her nipple interceding for
every person born,
Three scythes at harvest whizzing in a row from three lusty angels
with shirts bagg'd out at their waists,
The snag-tooth'd hostler with red hair redeeming sins past and to
come,
Selling all he possesses, traveling on foot to fee lawyers for his
brother and sit by him while he is tried for forgery;
What was strewn in the amplest strewing the square rod about me, and
not filling the square rod then,
The bull and the bug never worshipp'd half enough,
Dung and dirt more admirable than was dream'd,
The supernatural of no account, myself waiting my time to be one of
the supremes,
The day getting ready for me when I shall do as much good as the
best, and be as prodigious;
By my life-lumps! becoming already a creator,
Putting myself here and now to the ambush'd womb of the shadows.


42
A call in the midst of the crowd,
My own voice, orotund sweeping and final.

Come my children,
Come my boys and girls, my women, household and intimates,
Now the performer launches his nerve, he has pass'd his prelude on
the reeds within.

Easily written loose-finger'd chords - I feel the thrum of your
climax and close.

My head slues round on my neck,
Music rolls, but not from the organ,
Folks are around me, but they are no household of mine.

Ever the hard unsunk ground,
Ever the eaters and drinkers, ever the upward and downward sun, ever
the air and the ceaseless tides,
Ever myself and my neighbors, refreshing, wicked, real,
Ever the old inexplicable query, ever that thorn'd thumb, that
breath of itches and thirsts,
Ever the vexer's hoot! hoot! till we find where the sly one hides
and bring him forth,
Ever love, ever the sobbing liquid of life,
Ever the bandage under the chin, ever the trestles of death.

Here and there with dimes on the eyes walking,
To feed the greed of the belly the brains liberally spooning,
Tickets buying, taking, selling, but in to the feast never once going,
Many sweating, ploughing, thrashing, and then the chaff for payment
receiving,
A few idly owning, and they the wheat continually claiming.

This is the city and I am one of the citizens,
Whatever interests the rest interests me, politics, wars, markets,
newspapers, schools,
The mayor and councils, banks, tariffs, steamships, factories,
stocks, stores, real estate and personal estate.

The little plentiful manikins skipping around in collars and tail'd
coats
I am aware who they are, (they are positively not worms or fleas,)
I acknowledge the duplicates of myself, the weakest and shallowest
is deathless with me,
What I do and say the same waits for them,
Every thought that flounders in me the same flounders in them.

I know perfectly well my own egotism,
Know my omnivorous lines and must not write any less,
And would fetch you whoever you are flush with myself.

Not words of routine this song of mine,
But abruptly to question, to leap beyond yet nearer bring;
This printed and bound book - but the printer and the
printing-office boy?
The well-taken photographs - but your wife or friend close and solid
in your arms?
The black ship mail'd with iron, her mighty guns in her turrets - but
the pluck of the captain and engineers?
In the houses the dishes and fare and furniture - but the host and
hostess, and the look out of their eyes?
The sky up there - yet here or next door, or across the way?
The saints and sages in history - but you yourself?
Sermons, creeds, theology - but the fathomless human brain,
And what is reason? and what is love? and what is life?

43
I do not despise you priests, all time, the world over,
My faith is the greatest of faiths and the least of faiths,
Enclosing worship ancient and modern and all between ancient and
modern,
Believing I shall come again upon the earth after five thousand
years,
Waiting responses from oracles, honoring the gods, saluting the sun,
Making a fetich of the first rock or stump, powowing with sticks in
the circle of obis,
Helping the llama or brahmin as he trims the lamps of the idols,
Dancing yet through the streets in a phallic procession, rapt and
austere in the woods a gymnosophist,
Drinking mead from the skull-cap, to Shastas and Vedas admirant,
minding the Koran,
Walking the teokallis, spotted with gore from the stone and knife,
beating the serpent-skin drum,
Accepting the Gospels, accepting him that was crucified, knowing
assuredly that he is divine,
To the mass kneeling or the puritan's prayer rising, or sitting
patiently in a pew,
Ranting and frothing in my insane crisis, or waiting dead-like till
my spirit arouses me,
Looking forth on pavement and land, or outside of pavement and land,
Belonging to the winders of the circuit of circuits.

One of that centripetal and centrifugal gang I turn and talk like
man leaving charges before a journey.

Down-hearted doubters dull and excluded,
Frivolous, sullen, moping, angry, affected, dishearten'd,
atheistical,
I know every one of you, I know the sea of torment, doubt, despair
and unbelief.

How the flukes splash!
How they contort rapid as lightning, with spasms and spouts of
blood!

Be at peace bloody flukes of doubters and sullen mopers,
I take my place among you as much as among any,
The past is the push of you, me, all, precisely the same,
And what is yet untried and afterward is for you, me, all, precisely
the same.

I do not know what is untried and afterward,
But I know it will in its turn prove sufficient, and cannot fail.

Each who passes is consider'd, each who stops is consider'd, not
single one can it fall.

It cannot fall the young man who died and was buried,
Nor the young woman who died and was put by his side,
Nor the little child that peep'd in at the door, and then drew back
and was never seen again,
Nor the old man who has lived without purpose, and feels it with
bitterness worse than gall,
Nor him in the poor house tubercled by rum and the bad disorder,
Nor the numberless slaughter'd and wreck'd, nor the brutish koboo
call'd the ordure of humanity,
Nor the sacs merely floating with open mouths for food to slip in,
Nor any thing in the earth, or down in the oldest graves of the
earth,
Nor any thing in the myriads of spheres, nor the myriads of myriads
that inhabit them,
Nor the present, nor the least wisp that is known.

44
It is time to explain myself - let us stand up.

What is known I strip away,
I launch all men and women forward with me into the Unknown.

The clock indicates the moment - but what does eternity indicate?

We have thus far exhausted trillions of winters and summers,
There are trillions ahead, and trillions ahead of them.

Births have brought us richness and variety,
And other births will bring us richness and variety.

I do not call one greater and one smaller,
That which fills its period and place is equal to any.

Were mankind murderous or jealous upon you, my brother, my sister?
I am sorry for you, they are not murderous or jealous upon me,
All has been gentle with me, I keep no account with lamentation,
(What have I to do with lamentation?)

I am an acme of things accomplish'd, and I an encloser of things to
be.

My feet strike an apex of the apices of the stairs,
On every step bunches of ages, and larger bunches between the steps,
All below duly travel'd, and still I mount and mount.

Rise after rise bow the phantoms behind me,
Afar down I see the huge first Nothing, I know I was even there,
I waited unseen and always, and slept through the lethargic mist,
And took my time, and took no hurt from the fetid carbon.

Long I was hugg'd close - long and long.

Immense have been the preparations for me,
Faithful and friendly the arms that have help'd me.

Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing like cheerful boatmen,
For room to me stars kept aside in their own rings,
They sent influences to look after what was to hold me.

Before I was born out of my mother generations guided me,
My embryo has never been torpid, nothing could overlay it.

For it the nebula cohered to an orb,
The long slow strata piled to rest it on,
Vast vegetables gave it sustenance,
Monstrous sauroids transported it in their mouths and deposited it
with care.

All forces have been steadily employ'd to complete and delight me,
Now on this spot I stand with my robust soul.


45
O span of youth! ever-push'd elasticity!
O manhood, balanced, florid and full.

My lovers suffocate me,
Crowding my lips, thick in the pores of my skin,
Jostling me through streets and public halls, coming naked to me at
night,
Crying by day, Ahoy! from the rocks of the river, swinging and
chirping over my head,
Calling my name from flower-beds, vines, tangled underbrush,
Lighting on every moment of my life,
Bussing my body with soft balsamic busses,
Noiselessly passing handfuls out of their hearts and giving them to
be mine.

Old age superbly rising! O welcome, ineffable grace of dying days!

Every condition promulges not only itself, it promulges what grows
after and out of itself,
And the dark hush promulges as much as any.

I open my scuttle at night and see the far-sprinkled systems,
And all I see multiplied as high as I can cipher edge but the rim of
the farther systems.

Wider and wider they spread, expanding, always expanding,
Outward and outward and forever outward.


My sun has his sun and round him obediently wheels,
He joins with his partners a group of superior circuit,
And greater sets follow, making specks of the greatest inside them.

There is no stoppage and never can be stoppage,
If I, you, and the worlds, and all beneath or upon their surfaces,
were this moment reduced back to a pallid float, it would
not avail the long run,
We should surely bring up again where we now stand,
And surely go as much farther, and then farther and farther.

A few quadrillions of eras, a few octillions of cubic leagues, do
not hazard the span or make it impatient,
They are but parts, any thing is but a part.

See ever so far, there is limitless space outside of that,
Count ever so much, there is limitless time around that.

My rendezvous is appointed, it is certain,
The Lord will be there and wait till I come on perfect terms,
The great Camerado, the lover true for whom I pine will be there.

46
I know I have the best of time and space, and was never measured and
never will be measured.

I tramp a perpetual journey, (come listen all!)
My signs are a rain-proof coat, good shoes, and a staff cut from the
woods,
No friend of mine takes his ease in my chair,
I have no chair, no church, no philosophy,
I lead no man to a dinner-table, library, exchange,
But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll,
My left hand hooking you round the waist,
My right hand pointing to landscapes of continents and the public
road.

Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you,
You must travel it for yourself.

It is not far, it is within reach,
Perhaps you have been on it since you were born and did not know,
Perhaps it is everywhere on water and on land.

Shoulder your duds dear son, and I will mine, and let us hasten
forth,
Wonderful cities and free nations we shall fetch as we go.

If you tire, give me both burdens, and rest the chuff of your hand
on my hip,
And in due time you shall repay the same service to me,
For after we start we never lie by again.

This day before dawn I ascended a hill and look'd at the crowded
heaven,
And I said to my spirit When we become the enfolders of those orbs,
and the pleasure and knowledge of every thing in them, shall we
be fill'd and satisfied then?
And my spirit said No, we but level that lift to pass and continue
beyond.

You are also asking me questions and I hear you,
I answer that I cannot answer, you must find out for yourself.

Sit a while dear son,
Here are biscuits to eat and here is milk to drink,
But as soon as you sleep and renew yourself in sweet clothes, I kiss
you with a good-by kiss and open the gate for your egress

hence.

Long enough have you dream'd contemptible dreams,
Now I wash the gum from your eyes,
You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every
moment of your life.

Long have you timidly waded holding a plank by the shore,
Now I will you to be a bold swimmer,
To jump off in the midst of the sea, rise again, nod to me, shout,
and laughingly dash with your hair.

47
I am the teacher of athletes,
He that by me spreads a wider breast than my own proves the width
of my own,
He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher.

The boy I love, the same becomes a man not through derived power,
but in his own right,
Wicked rather than virtuous out of conformity or fear,
Fond of his sweetheart, relishing well his steak,
Unrequited love or a slight cutting him worse than sharp steel cuts,
First-rate to ride, to fight, to hit the bull's eye, to sail a
skiff, to sing a song or play on the banjo,
Preferring scars and the beard and faces pitted with small-pox over
all latherers,
And those well-tann'd to those that keep out of the sun.

I teach straying from me, yet who can stray from me?
I follow you whoever you are from the present hour,
My words itch at your ears till you understand them.


I do not say these things for a dollar or to fill up the time while
I wait for a boat,



(It is you talking just as much as myself, I act as the tongue of
you,
Tied in your mouth, in mine it begins to be loosen'd.)

I swear I will never again mention love or death inside a house,
And I swear I will never translate myself at all, only to him or her
who privately stays with me in the open air.

If you would understand me go to the heights or water-shore,
The nearest gnat is an explanation, and a drop or motion of waves
key,
The maul, the oar, the hand-saw, second my words.

No shutter'd room or school can commune with me,
But roughs and little children better than they.

The young mechanic is closest to me, he knows me well,
The woodman that takes his axe and jug with him shall take me with
him all day,
The farm-boy ploughing in the field feels good at the sound of my
voice,
In vessels that sail my words sail, I go with fishermen and seamen
and love them.

The soldier camp'd or upon the march is mine,
On the night ere the pending battle many seek me, and I do not fail
them,
On that solemn night (it may be their last) those that know me seek
me.
My face rubs to the hunter's face when he lies down alone in his
blanket,
The driver thinking of me does not mind the jolt of his wagon,
The young mother and old mother comprehend me,
The girl and the wife rest the needle a moment and forget where they
are,
They and all would resume what I have told them.

48
I have said that the soul is not more than the body,
And I have said that the body is not more than the soul,
And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one's self is,
And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own
funeral drest in his shroud,
And I or you pocketless of a dime may purchase the pick of the
earth,
And to glance with an eye or show a bean in its pod confounds the
learning of all times,
And there is no trade or employment but the young man following it
may become a hero,
And there is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheel'd
universe,
And I say to any man or woman, Let your soul stand cool and composed
before a million universes.

And I say to mankind, Be not curious about God,
For I who am curious about each am not curious about God,
(No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God and
about death.)

I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the
least,
Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself.

Why should I wish to see God better than this day?
I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment
then,
In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the
glass,
I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is sign'd
by God's name,
And I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe'er I go,
Others will punctually come for ever and ever.

49
And as to you Death, and you bitter hug of mortality, it is idle to
try to alarm me.

To his work without flinching the accoucheur comes,
I see the elder-hand pressing receiving supporting,
I recline by the sills of the exquisite flexible doors,
And mark the outlet, and mark the relief and escape.

And as to you Corpse I think you are good manure, but that does not
offend me,
I smell the white roses sweet-scented and growing,
I reach to the leafy lips, I reach to the polish'd breasts of
melons.

And as to you Life I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths,
(No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before.)

I hear you whispering there O stars of heaven,
O suns - O grass of graves - O perpetual transfers and promotions,
If you do not say any thing how can I say any thing?

Of the turbid pool that lies in the autumn forest,
Of the moon that descends the steeps of the soughing twilight,
Toss, sparkles of day and dusk - toss on the black stems that decay
in the muck,
Toss to the moaning gibberish of the dry limbs.

I ascend from the moon, I ascend from the night,
I perceive that the ghastly glimmer is noonday sunbeams reflected,
And debouch to the steady and central from the offspring great or
small.


There is that in me - I do not know what it is - but I know it is in
me.

Wrench'd and sweaty - calm and cool then my body becomes,
I sleep - I sleep long.

I do not know it - it is without name - it is a word unsaid,
It is not in any dictionary, utterance, symbol.

Something it swings on more than the earth I swing on,
To it the creation is the friend whose embracing awakes me.

Perhaps I might tell more. Outlines! I plead for my brothers and
sisters.

Do you see O my brothers and sisters?
It is not chaos or death - it is form, union, plan - it is eternal
life - it is Happiness.

51
The past and present wilt - I have fill'd them, emptied them.
And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.

Listener up there! what have you to confide to me?
Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening,
(Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute
longer.)

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab.

Who has done his day's work? who will soonest be through with his supper?
Who wishes to walk with me?

Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too late?

52
The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and 
my loitering.
I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

The last scud of day holds back for me,
It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow'd 
wilds,
It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.

I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.
The Gilded ~ Mark Brooks
The Kings of ancient times had stolen sheen,
In velvet robes and gowns they hid from wind,
And now exposed where Phoebus cart hath been,
There's frailty where our eyes were falsely pinned.
And she like royalty hath golden skin,
Soon cadent tears with Time carve channels deep,
The girl like fruit too ripe rots from within,
The lance of vengence in her hart will steep.
So popes and kings and she have cleft in twain
The heart that youth and love preserve alone,
And innocence is jaded by such pain;
Inside now look not under wood or stone.
Impressed be not with gold or purple eyes,
Through true and basest hearts the kingdom lies.

(I wrote the sonnet last year and it has been revised since then)
Dulce et Decorum Est ~ Wilfred Owen
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! -- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under I green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, --
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
How to Die ~ Siegfried Sassoon
Dark clouds are smouldering into red
  While down the craters morning burns.
The dying soldier shifts his head
  To watch the glory that returns;
He lifts his fingers toward the skies
  Where holy brightness breaks in flame;
Radiance reflected in his eyes,
  And on his lips a whispered name.

You'd think, to hear some people talk,
  That lads go West with sobs and curses,
And sullen faces white as chalk,
  Hankering for wreaths and tombs and hearses.
But they've been taught the way to do it
  Like Christian soldiers; not with haste
And shuddering groans; but passing through it
  With due regard for decent taste.

No man is an island, entire of itself
every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main
if a clod be washed away by the sea, 
Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, 
as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were
any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind
and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls
it tolls for thee.
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud ~ William Wordsworth
I WANDERED lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

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

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

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
The Unknown Citizen ~ W.H. Auden
(To JS/07 M 378
This Marble Monument
Is Erected by the State)

He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in a hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Instalment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content 
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace:  when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.
The Moose ~ Elizabeth Bishop
From narrow provinces
of fish and bread and tea,
home of the long tides
where the bay leaves the sea
twice a day and takes
the herrings long rides,

where if the river
enters or retreats 
in a wall of brown foam
depends on if it meets
the bay coming in,
the bay not at home;

where, silted red,
sometimes the sun sets
facing a red sea,
and others, veins the flats'
lavender, rich mud
in burning rivulets;

on red, gravelly roads,
down rows of sugar maples,
past clapboard farmhouses
and neat, clapboard churches,
bleached, ridged as clamshells,
past twin silver birches,

through late afternoon
a bus journeys west,
the windshield flashing pink,
pink glancing off of metal,
brushing the dented flank
of blue, beat-up enamel;

down hollows, up rises,
and waits, patient, while
a lone traveller gives
kisses and embraces
to seven relatives
and a collie supervises.

Goodbye to the elms,
to the farm, to the dog.
The bus starts.  The light
grows richer; the fog,
shifting, salty, thin,
comes closing in.

Its cold, round crystals
form and slide and settle
in the white hens' feathers,
in gray glazed cabbages,
on the cabbage roses
and lupins like apostles;

the sweet peas cling
to their wet white string
on the whitewashed fences;
bumblebees creep
inside the foxgloves,
and evening commences.

One stop at Bass River.
Then the Economies 
Lower, Middle, Upper;
Five Islands, Five Houses,
where a woman shakes a tablecloth
out after supper.

A pale flickering.  Gone.
The Tantramar marshes 
and the smell of salt hay.
An iron bridge trembles 
and a loose plank rattles
but doesn't give way.

On the left, a red light
swims through the dark:
a ship's port lantern.
Two rubber boots show,
illuminated, solemn.
A dog gives one bark.

A woman climbs in 
with two market bags,
brisk, freckled, elderly.
"A grand night.  Yes, sir,
all the way to Boston."
She regards us amicably.

Moonlight as we enter 
the New Brunswick woods,
hairy, scratchy, splintery;
moonlight and mist
caught in them like lamb's wool
on bushes in a pasture.

The passengers lie back.
Snores.  Some long sighs.
A dreamy divagation
begins in the night,
a gentle, auditory,
slow hallucination. . . .

In the creakings and noises,
an old conversation
--not concerning us,
but recognizable, somewhere,
back in the bus:
Grandparents' voices

uninterruptedly

talking, in Eternity:
names being mentioned,
things cleared up finally;
what he said, what she said,
who got pensioned;

deaths, deaths and sicknesses;
the year he remarried;
the year (something) happened.
She died in childbirth.
That was the son lost
when the schooner foundered.

He took to drink. Yes.
She went to the bad.
When Amos began to pray
even in the store and
finally the family had
to put him away.

"Yes . . ." that peculiar
affirmative.  "Yes . . ."
A sharp, indrawn breath,
half groan, half acceptance,
that means "Life's like that.
We know it (also death)."

Talking the way they talked 
in the old featherbed,
peacefully, on and on,
dim lamplight in the hall,
down in the kitchen, the dog
tucked in her shawl.

Now, it's all right now
even to fall asleep
just as on all those nights.
--Suddenly the bus driver
stops with a jolt,
turns off his lights.

A moose has come out of 
the impenetrable wood
and stands there, looms, rather,
in the middle of the road.
It approaches; it sniffs at
the bus's hot hood.

Towering, antlerless,
high as a church,
homely as a house
(or, safe as houses).
A man's voice assures us
"Perfectly harmless. . . ."

Some of the passengers
exclaim in whispers,
childishly, softly,
"Sure are big creatures."
"It's awful plain."
"Look! It's a she!"

Taking her time,
she looks the bus over,
grand, otherworldly.
Why, why do we feel
(we all feel) this sweet
sensation of joy?

"Curious creatures,"
says our quiet driver,
rolling his r's.
"Look at that, would you."
Then he shifts gears.
For a moment longer,

by craning backward,
the moose can be seen
on the moonlit macadam;
then there's a dim
smell of moose, an acrid
smell of gasoline.
The Raven ~ Edgar Allen Poe
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
`'Tis some visitor,' I muttered, `tapping at my chamber door -
Only this, and nothing more.'

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

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

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

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before
But the silence was unbroken, and the darkness gave no token,
And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, `Lenore!'
This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, `Lenore!'

Merely this and nothing more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And the raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming,
And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted - nevermore!
Out, Out- ~ Robert Frost
The Buzz-Saw snarled and rattled in the yard	
And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,	
Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.	
And from there those that lifted eyes could count	
Five mountain ranges one behind the other	        5
Under the sunset far into Vermont.	
And the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled,	
As it ran light, or had to bear a load.	
And nothing happened: day was all but done.	
Call it a day, I wish they might have said	        10
To please the boy by giving him the half hour	
That a boy counts so much when saved from work.	
His sister stood beside them in her apron	
To tell them Supper. At the word, the saw,	
As if to prove saws knew what supper meant,	        15
Leaped out at the boys hand, or seemed to leap	
He must have given the hand. However it was,	
Neither refused the meeting. But the hand!	
The boys first outcry was a rueful laugh,	
As he swung toward them holding up the hand	        20
Half in appeal, but half as if to keep	
The life from spilling. Then the boy saw all	
Since he was old enough to know, big boy	
Doing a mans work, though a child at heart	
He saw all spoiled. Dont let him cut my hand off	25
The doctor, when he comes. Dont let him, sister!	
So. But the hand was gone already.	
The doctor put him in the dark of ether.	
He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath.	
And thenthe watcher at his pulse took fright.	        30
No one believed. They listened at his heart.	
Littlelessnothing!and that ended it.	
No more to build on there. And they, since they	
Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.
Casey Jones ~ Anonymous
Come all you rounders, for I want you to hear,
The story of a brave engineer.
Casey Jones was the rounder's name.
On a big eight wheeler of a mighty fame.

Caller called Casey 'bout half-past four,
He kissed his wife at the station door,
Climbed to the cab with the orders in his hand,
He says, "This is my trip to the holy land."

Out of South Memphis yard on the fly,
Heard the fireman say, "You got a white eye."
Well, the switchmen knew by the engine moan
That the man at the throttle was Casy Jones.

The rain was comin' down five or six weeks.
The railroad track was like the bed of a creek.
They slowed her down to a thirty mile gait
And the south-bound mail was eight hours late.

Fireman says, "Casey, you're runnin' too fast,
You run that block board the last station you passed."
Casey says, I believe we'll make it though
For she steams a lot better than I ever know."

Casey says, "Fireman, don't you fret,
Keep knockin' at the fire door, don't give up yet,
I'm going to run her till she leaves the rail,
Or make it on time with the south-bound mail."

Around the curve and down the dump,
Two locomotives was a bound to jump,
Fireman hollered, "Casey, it's just ahead,
We might jump and make it but we'll all be dead."

Around the curve comes a passenger train,
Casey blows the whistle, tells the fireman, "Ring the bell,"
Fireman jumps and says, "Good-by,
Casey Jones, you're bound to die."

Well Casey Jones was all right.
He stuck to his duty day and night.
They loved his whistle and his ring number three,
And he came home into Memphis on the old I.C.

Fireman goes down the depot track,
Begging his honey to take him back,
She says, "Oranges on the table, peaches on the shelf,
You're a goin' to get tired sleepin' by yourself."

Mrs. Casey Jones was a sittin' on the bed.
Telegram comes that Casey is dead.
She says, "Children, go to bed, and hush your cryin',
'Cause you got another papa on the Frisco line."

Headaches and heartaches and all kinds of pain.
They ain't apart from a railroad train.
Stories of brave men, noble and grand,
Belong to the life of a railroad man.
Websites telling the real story of Casey Jones:

Roots of the Grateful Dead

Water Valley Casey Jones Railroad Museum
Ode ~ William Wordsworth
536. Ode
Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
  
THERE was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,	 
    The earth, and every common sight,	 
            To me did seem	 
    Apparell'd in celestial light,	 
The glory and the freshness of a dream.	         5
It is not now as it hath been of yore;	 
        Turn wheresoe'er I may,	 
            By night or day,	 
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.	 
 
        The rainbow comes and goes,	  10
        And lovely is the rose;	 
        The moon doth with delight	 
    Look round her when the heavens are bare;	 
        Waters on a starry night	 
        Are beautiful and fair;	  15
    The sunshine is a glorious birth;	 
    But yet I know, where'er I go,	 
That there hath pass'd away a glory from the earth.	 
 
Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song,	 
    And while the young lambs bound	  20
        As to the tabor's sound,	 
To me alone there came a thought of grief:	 
A timely utterance gave that thought relief,	 
        And I again am strong:	 
The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep;	  25
No more shall grief of mine the season wrong;	 
I hear the echoes through the mountains throng,	 
The winds come to me from the fields of sleep,	 
        And all the earth is gay;	 
            Land and sea	  30
    Give themselves up to jollity,	 
      And with the heart of May	 
    Doth every beast keep holiday;	 
          Thou Child of Joy,	 
Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy	  35
    Shepherd-boy!	 
 
Ye blessd creatures, I have heard the call	 
    Ye to each other make; I see	 
The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee;	 
    My heart is at your festival,	  40
      My head hath its coronal,	 
The fulness of your bliss, I feelI feel it all.	 
        O evil day! if I were sullen	 
        While Earth herself is adorning,	 
            This sweet May-morning,	  45
        And the children are culling	 
            On every side,	 
        In a thousand valleys far and wide,	 
        Fresh flowers; while the sun shines warm,	 
And the babe leaps up on his mother's arm:	  50
        I hear, I hear, with joy I hear!	 
        But there's a tree, of many, one,	 
A single field which I have look'd upon,	 
Both of them speak of something that is gone:	 
          The pansy at my feet	  55
          Doth the same tale repeat:	 
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?	 
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?	 
 
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:	 
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,	  60
        Hath had elsewhere its setting,	 
          And cometh from afar:	 
        Not in entire forgetfulness,	 
        And not in utter nakedness,	 
But trailing clouds of glory do we come	  65
        From God, who is our home:	 
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!	 
Shades of the prison-house begin to close	 
        Upon the growing Boy,	 
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,	  70
        He sees it in his joy;	 
The Youth, who daily farther from the east	 
    Must travel, still is Nature's priest,	 
      And by the vision splendid	 
      Is on his way attended;	  75
At length the Man perceives it die away,	 
And fade into the light of common day.	 
 
Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;	 
Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,	 
And, even with something of a mother's mind,	  80
        And no unworthy aim,	 
    The homely nurse doth all she can	 
To make her foster-child, her Inmate Man,	 
    Forget the glories he hath known,	 
And that imperial palace whence he came.	  85
 
Behold the Child among his new-born blisses,	 
A six years' darling of a pigmy size!	 
See, where 'mid work of his own hand he lies,	 
Fretted by sallies of his mother's kisses,	 
With light upon him from his father's eyes!	  90
See, at his feet, some little plan or chart,	 
Some fragment from his dream of human life,	 
Shaped by himself with newly-learnd art;	 
    A wedding or a festival,	 
    A mourning or a funeral;	  95
        And this hath now his heart,	 
    And unto this he frames his song:	 
        Then will he fit his tongue	 
To dialogues of business, love, or strife;	 
        But it will not be long	 100
        Ere this be thrown aside,	 
        And with new joy and pride	 
The little actor cons another part;	 
Filling from time to time his 'humorous stage'	 
With all the Persons, down to palsied Age,	 105
That Life brings with her in her equipage;	 
        As if his whole vocation	 
        Were endless imitation.	 
 
Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie	 
        Thy soul's immensity;	 110
Thou best philosopher, who yet dost keep	 
Thy heritage, thou eye among the blind,	 
That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep,	 
Haunted for ever by the eternal mind,	 
        Mighty prophet! Seer blest!	 115
        On whom those truths do rest,	 
Which we are toiling all our lives to find,	 
In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave;	 
Thou, over whom thy Immortality	 
Broods like the Day, a master o'er a slave,	 120
A presence which is not to be put by;	 
          To whom the grave	 
Is but a lonely bed without the sense or sight	 
        Of day or the warm light,	 
A place of thought where we in waiting lie;	 125
Thou little Child, yet glorious in the might	 
Of heaven-born freedom on thy being's height,	 
Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke	 
The years to bring the inevitable yoke,	 
Thus blindly with thy blessedness at strife?	 130
Full soon thy soul shall have her earthly freight,	 
And custom lie upon thee with a weight,	 
Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!	 
 
        O joy! that in our embers	 
        Is something that doth live,	 135
        That nature yet remembers	 
        What was so fugitive!	 
The thought of our past years in me doth breed	 
Perpetual benediction: not indeed	 
For that which is most worthy to be blest	 140
Delight and liberty, the simple creed	 
Of childhood, whether busy or at rest,	 
With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast:	 
        Not for these I raise	 
        The song of thanks and praise;	 145
    But for those obstinate questionings	 
    Of sense and outward things,	 
    Fallings from us, vanishings;	 
    Blank misgivings of a Creature	 
Moving about in worlds not realized,	 150
High instincts before which our mortal Nature	 
Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised:	 
        But for those first affections,	 
        Those shadowy recollections,	 
      Which, be they what they may,	 155
Are yet the fountain-light of all our day,	 
Are yet a master-light of all our seeing;	 
  Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make	 
Our noisy years seem moments in the being	 
Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake,	 160
            To perish never:	 
Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour,	 
            Nor Man nor Boy,	 
Nor all that is at enmity with joy,	 
Can utterly abolish or destroy!	 165
    Hence in a season of calm weather	 
        Though inland far we be,	 
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea	 
        Which brought us hither,	 
    Can in a moment travel thither,	 170
And see the children sport upon the shore,	 
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.	 
 
Then sing, ye birds, sing, sing a joyous song!	 
        And let the young lambs bound	 
        As to the tabor's sound!	 175
We in thought will join your throng,	 
      Ye that pipe and ye that play,	 
      Ye that through your hearts to-day	 
      Feel the gladness of the May!	 
What though the radiance which was once so bright	 180
Be now for ever taken from my sight,	 
    Though nothing can bring back the hour	 
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;	 
      We will grieve not, rather find	 
      Strength in what remains behind;	 185
      In the primal sympathy	 
      Which having been must ever be;	 
      In the soothing thoughts that spring	 
      Out of human suffering;	 
      In the faith that looks through death,	 190
In years that bring the philosophic mind.	 
 
And O ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves,	 
Forebode not any severing of our loves!	 
Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might;	 
I only have relinquish'd one delight	 195
To live beneath your more habitual sway.	 
I love the brooks which down their channels fret,	 
Even more than when I tripp'd lightly as they;	 
The innocent brightness of a new-born Day	 
            Is lovely yet;	 200
The clouds that gather round the setting sun	 
Do take a sober colouring from an eye	 
That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality;	 
Another race hath been, and other palms are won.	 
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,	 205
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,	 
To me the meanest flower that blows can give	 
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
The Tuft of Flowers ~ Robert Frost
I went to turn the grass once after one
Who mowed it in the dew before the sun.

The dew was gone that made his blade so keen
Before I came to view the levelled scene.

I looked for him behind an isle of trees;
I listened for his whetstone on the breeze.

But he had gone his way, the grass all mown,
And I must be, as he had been,--alone,

`As all must be,' I said within my heart,
`Whether they work together or apart.'

But as I said it, swift there passed me by
On noiseless wing a 'wildered butterfly,

Seeking with memories grown dim o'er night
Some resting flower of yesterday's delight.

And once I marked his flight go round and round,
As where some flower lay withering on the ground.

And then he flew as far as eye could see,
And then on tremulous wing came back to me.

I thought of questions that have no reply,
And would have turned to toss the grass to dry;

But he turned first, and led my eye to look
At a tall tuft of flowers beside a brook,

A leaping tongue of bloom the scythe had spared
Beside a reedy brook the scythe had bared.

I left my place to know them by their name,
Finding them butterfly weed when I came.

The mower in the dew had loved them thus,
By leaving them to flourish, not for us,

Nor yet to draw one thought of ours to him.
But from sheer morning gladness at the brim.

The butterfly and I had lit upon,
Nevertheless, a message from the dawn,

That made me hear the wakening birds around,
And hear his long scythe whispering to the ground,

And feel a spirit kindred to my own;
So that henceforth I worked no more alone;

But glad with him, I worked as with his aid,
And weary, sought at noon with him the shade;

And dreaming, as it were, held brotherly speech
With one whose thought I had not hoped to reach.

`Men work together,' I told him from the heart,
`Whether they work together or apart.' 
A Dream Within a Dream ~ Edgar Allan Poe
Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow-
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand-
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?
Psalm 52 ~ Mary Sidney
Tyrant, why swell'st thou thus,
    Of mischief vaunting?
Since help from God to us
    Is never wanting.

Lewd lies thy tongue contrives,
    Loud lies it soundeth;
Sharper than sharpest knives
    With lies it woundeth.

Falsehood thy wit approves,
    All truth rejected:
Thy will all vices loves,
    Virtue neglected.

Not words from cursed thee,
    But gulfs are poured;
Gulfs wherein daily be
    Good men devoured.

Think'st thou to bear it so?
    God shall displace thee;
God shall thee overthrow,
    Crush thee, deface thee.

The just shall fearing see
    These fearful chances,
And laughing shoot at thee
    With scornful glances.

Lo, lo, the wretched wight,
    Who God disdaining,
His mischief made his might,
    His guard his gaining.

I as an olive tree
    Still green shall flourish:
God's house the soil shall be
    My roots to nourish.

My trust in his true love
    Truly attending,
Shall never thence remove,
    Never see ending.

Thee will I honour still,
    Lord, for this justice;
There fix my hopes I will
    Where thy saints' trust is.

Thy saints trust in thy name,
    Therein they joy them:
Protected by the same,
    Naught can annoy them.
On First Looking into Chapman's Homer ~ John Keats
Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific--and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise--
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
Musee des Beaux Arts ~ W.H. Auden
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
The Lady of Shalott ~ Alfred, Lord Tennyson
PART I
ON either side the river lie	 
Long fields of barley and of rye,	 
That clothe the wold and meet the sky;	 
And thro' the field the road runs by	 
          To many-tower'd Camelot;	        
And up and down the people go,	 
Gazing where the lilies blow	 
Round an island there below,	 
          The island of Shalott.	 
 
Willows whiten, aspens quiver,	  
Little breezes dusk and shiver	 
Thro' the wave that runs for ever	 
By the island in the river	 
          Flowing down to Camelot.	 
Four gray walls, and four gray towers,	 
Overlook a space of flowers,	 
And the silent isle imbowers	 
          The Lady of Shalott.	 
 
By the margin, willow-veil'd,	 
Slide the heavy barges trail'd	  
By slow horses; and unhail'd	 
The shallop flitteth silken-sail'd	 
          Skimming down to Camelot:	 
But who hath seen her wave her hand?	 
Or at the casement seen her stand?	  
Or is she known in all the land,	 
          The Lady of Shalott?	 
 
Only reapers, reaping early	 
In among the bearded barley,	 
Hear a song that echoes cheerly	  
From the river winding clearly,	 
          Down to tower'd Camelot:	 
And by the moon the reaper weary,	 
Piling sheaves in uplands airy,	 
Listening, whispers ''Tis the fairy	  
          Lady of Shalott.'	 
 
PART II

There she weaves by night and day	 
A magic web with colours gay.	 
She has heard a whisper say,	 
A curse is on her if she stay	  
          To look down to Camelot.	 
She knows not what the curse may be,	 
And so she weaveth steadily,	 
And little other care hath she,	 
          The Lady of Shalott.	  
 
And moving thro' a mirror clear	 
That hangs before her all the year,	 
Shadows of the world appear.	 
There she sees the highway near	 
          Winding down to Camelot:	  
There the river eddy whirls,	 
And there the surly village-churls,	 
And the red cloaks of market girls,	 
          Pass onward from Shalott.	 
 
Sometimes a troop of damsels glad,	 
An abbot on an ambling pad,	 
Sometimes a curly shepherd-lad,	 
Or long-hair'd page in crimson clad,	 
          Goes by to tower'd Camelot;	 
And sometimes thro' the mirror blue	  
The knights come riding two and two:	 
She hath no loyal knight and true,	 
          The Lady of Shalott.	 
 
But in her web she still delights	 
To weave the mirror's magic sights,	  
For often thro' the silent nights	 
A funeral, with plumes and lights,	 
          And music, went to Camelot:	 
Or when the moon was overhead,	 
Came two young lovers lately wed;	  
'I am half sick of shadows,' said	 
          The Lady of Shalott.	 

PART III

A bow-shot from her bower-eaves,	 
He rode between the barley-sheaves,	 
The sun came dazzling thro' the leaves,	  
And flamed upon the brazen greaves	 
          Of bold Sir Lancelot.	 
A red-cross knight for ever kneel'd	 
To a lady in his shield,	 
That sparkled on the yellow field,	  
          Beside remote Shalott.	 
 
The gemmy bridle glitter'd free,	 
Like to some branch of stars we see	 
Hung in the golden Galaxy.	 
The bridle bells rang merrily	  85
          As he rode down to Camelot:	 
And from his blazon'd baldric slung	 
A mighty silver bugle hung,	 
And as he rode his armour rung,	 
          Beside remote Shalott.	  
 
All in the blue unclouded weather	 
Thick-jewell'd shone the saddle-leather,	 
The helmet and the helmet-feather	 
Burn'd like one burning flame together,	 
          As he rode down to Camelot.	 
As often thro' the purple night,	 
Below the starry clusters bright,	 
Some bearded meteor, trailing light,	 
          Moves over still Shalott.	 
 
His broad clear brow in sunlight glow'd;	
On burnish'd hooves his war-horse trode;	 
From underneath his helmet flow'd	 
His coal-black curls as on he rode,	 
          As he rode down to Camelot.	 
From the bank and from the river	
He flash'd into the crystal mirror,	 
'Tirra lirra,' by the river	 
          Sang Sir Lancelot.	 
 
She left the web, she left the loom,	 
She made three paces thro' the room,	
She saw the water-lily bloom,	 
She saw the helmet and the plume,	 
          She look'd down to Camelot.	 
Out flew the web and floated wide;	 
The mirror crack'd from side to side;	
'The curse is come upon me!' cried	 
          The Lady of Shalott.	 
 
PART IV

In the stormy east-wind straining,	 
The pale yellow woods were waning,	 
The broad stream in his banks complaining,	
Heavily the low sky raining	 
          Over tower'd Camelot;	 
 
Down she came and found a boat	 
Beneath a willow left afloat,	 
And round about the prow she wrote	
          The Lady of Shalott.	 
 
And down the river's dim expanse	 
Like some bold seer in a trance,	 
Seeing all his own mischance	 
With a glassy countenance	
          Did she look to Camelot.	 
And at the closing of the day	 
She loosed the chain, and down she lay;	 
The broad stream bore her far away,	 
          The Lady of Shalott.	
 
Lying, robed in snowy white	 
That loosely flew to left and right	 
The leaves upon her falling light	 
Thro' the noises of the night	 
          She floated down to Camelot:	
And as the boat-head wound along	 
The willowy hills and fields among,	 
They heard her singing her last song,	 
          The Lady of Shalott.	 
 
Heard a carol, mournful, holy,	 
Chanted loudly, chanted lowly,	 
Till her blood was frozen slowly,	 
And her eyes were darken'd wholly,	 
          Turn'd to tower'd Camelot;	 
For ere she reach'd upon the tide	
The first house by the water-side,	 
Singing in her song she died,	 
          The Lady of Shalott.	 
 
Under tower and balcony,	 
By garden-wall and gallery,	 
A gleaming shape she floated by,	 
Dead-pale between the houses high,	 
          Silent into Camelot.	 
Out upon the wharfs they came,	 
Knight and burgher, lord and dame,	
And round the prow they read her name,	 
          The Lady of Shalott.	 
 
Who is this? and what is here?	 
And in the lighted palace near	 
Died the sound of royal cheer;	
And they cross'd themselves for fear,	 
          All the knights at Camelot:	 
But Lancelot mused a little space;	 
He said, 'She has a lovely face;	 
God in His mercy lend her grace, 
          The Lady of Shalott.'

(there is an exorbitant amount of great art associated with this piece; I have only selected one of my favorite illustrations)
Golden Slumbers ~ Thomas Decker
Golden slumbers kiss your eyes,
Smiles awake you when you rise.
Sleep pretty wantons, do not cry,
And I will sing a lullaby;
Rock them, rock them, lullaby.

Care is heavy, therefore sleep you;
You are care, and care must keep you.
Sleep pretty wantons, do not cry,
And I will sing a lullaby;
Rock them, rock them, lullaby.
Stella's Birthday March 13th, 1727 ~ Jonathan Swift
            This day, whate'er the fates decree,
            Shall still be kept with joy by me:
            This day then let us not be told,
            That you are sick, and I grown old;
            Nor think on our approaching ills,
            And talk of spectacles and pills.
            Tomorrow will be time enough
            To hear such mortifying stuff.
            Yet, since from reason may be brought
            A better and more pleasing thought,
            Which can, in spite of all decays,
            Support a few remaining days:
            From not the gravest of divines
            Accept for once some serious lines.

            Although we now can form no more
            Long schemes of life, as heretofore;
            Yet you, while time is running fast,
            Can look with joy on what is past.

            Were future happiness and pain
            A mere contrivance of the brain,
            As atheists argue, to entice
            And fit their proselytes for vice;
            (The only comfort they propose,
            To have companions in their woes;)
            Grant this the case; yet sure 'tis hard
            That virtue, styled its own reward,
            And by all sages understood
            To be the chief of human good,
            Should acting, die, nor leave behind
            Some lasting pleasure in the mind;
            Which, by remembrance, will assuage
            Grief, sickness, poverty, and age;
            And strongly shoot a radiant dart
            To shine through life's declining part.

            Say, Stella, feel you no content,
            Reflecting on a life well spent?
            Your skilful hand employed to save
            Despairing wretches from the grave;
            And then supporting with your store
            Those whom you dragged from death before?
            (So Providence on mortals waits,
            Preserving what it first creates.)
            Your generous boldness to defend
            An innocent and absent friend;
            That courage which can make you just
            To merit humbled in the dust;
            The detestation you express
            For vice in all its glittering dress;
            That patience under torturing pain,
            Where stubborn stoics would complain.

            Must these like empty shadows pass,
            Or forms reflected from a glass?
            Or mere chimeras in the mind,
            That fly, and leave no marks behind?
            Does not the body thrive and grow
            By food of twenty years ago?
            And, had it not been still supplied,
            It must a thousand times have died.
            Then who with reason can maintain
            That no effects of food remain?
            And is not virtue in mankind
            The nutriment that feeds the mind;
            Upheld by each good action past,
            And still continued by the last?
            Then, who with reason can pretend
            That all effects of virtue end?

            Believe me, Stella, when you show
            That true contempt for things below,
            Nor prize your life for other ends,
            Than merely to oblige your friends;
            Your former actions claim their part,
            And join to fortify your heart.
            For virtue, in her daily race,
            Like Janus, bears a double face;
            Looks back with joy where she has gone
            And therefore goes with courage on:
            She at your sickly couch will wait,
            And guide you to a better state.

            O then, whatever Heaven intends,
            Take pity on your pitying friends!
            Nor let your ills affect your mind,
            To fancy they can be unkind.
            Me, surely me, you ought to spare,
            Who gladly would your sufferings share;
            Or give my scrap of life to you,
            And think it far beneath your due;
            You, to whose care so oft I owe
            That I'm alive to tell you so. 
Last Thoughts on Woody Guthry ~ Bob Dylan
There's this book comin' out, an' they asked me to write something about Woody...
Sort of like "What does Woody Guthrie mean to you?" in twenty-five words...

And I couldn't do it -- I wrote out five pages and... I have it here, it's...
Have it here by accident, actually... but I'd like to say this out loud...
So... if you can sort of roll along with this thing here, this is called
"Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie."

When your head gets twisted and your mind grows numb
When you think you're too old, too young, too smart or too dumb
When you're laggin' behind an' losin' your pace
In the slow-motion crawl or life's busy race
No matter whatcha doin' if you start givin' up
If the wine don't come to the top of your cup
If the wind got you sideways it's one hand holdin' on
And the other starts slippin' and the feelin' is gone
And your train engine fire needs a new spark to catch it
And the wood's easy findin' but you're lazy to fetch it
And your sidewalk starts curlin' and the street gets too long
And you start walkin' backwards though you know that it's wrong
And lonesome comes up as down goes the day
And tomorrow's mornin' seems so far away
And you feel the reins from your pony are slippin'
And your rope is a-slidin' 'cause your hands are a-drippin'
And your sun-decked desert and evergreen valleys
Turn to broken down slums and trash-can alleys
And your sky cries water and your drain pipe's a-pourin'
And the lightnin's a-flashin' and the thunder's a-crashin'
The windows are rattlin' and breakin' and the roof tops are shakin'
And your whole world's a-slammin' and bangin'
And your minutes of sun turn to hours of storm
An' to yourself you sometimes say
"I never knew it was gonna be this way
Why didn't they tell me the day I was born?"

And you start gettin' chills and you're jumpin' from sweat
And you're lookin' for somethin' you ain't quite found yet
And you're knee-deep in dark water with your hands in the air
And the whole world's watchin' with a window peek stare
And your good gal leaves and she's long gone a-flyin'
And your heart feels sick like fish when they're fryin'
And your jackhammer falls from your hands to your feet
But you need it badly an' it lays on the street
And your bell's bangin' loudly but you can't hear its beat
And you think your ears mighta been hurt
Your eyes've turned filthy from the sight-blindin' dirt
And you figured you failed in yesterday's rush
When you were faked out an' fooled while facin' a four flush
And all the time you were holdin' three queens
It's makin you mad, it's makin' you mean
Like in the middle of Life magazine
Bouncin' around a pinball machine
And there's something on your mind that you wanna be sayin'
That somebody someplace oughta be hearin'
But it's trapped on your tongue, sealed in your head
And it bothers you badly when your layin' in bed
And no matter how you try you just can't say it
And you're scared to your soul you just might forget it
And your eyes get swimmy from the tears in your head
An' your pillows of feathers turn to blankets of lead
And the lion's mouth opens and you're starin' at his teeth
And his jaws start closin' with you underneath
And you're flat on your belly with your hands tied behind
And you wish you'd never taken that last detour sign
You say to yourself just what am I doin'
On this road I'm walkin', on this trail I'm turnin'
On this curve I'm hangin'
On this pathway I'm strollin', this space I'm taking
And this air I'm inhaling?
Am I mixed up too much, am I mixed up too hard
Why am I walking, where am I running
What am I saying, what am I knowing
On this guitar I'm playing, on this banjo I'm frailing
On this mandolin I'm strumming, in the song I'm singing,
In the tune I'm humming, in the words that I'm thinking
In the words I'm writing
In this ocean of hours I'm all the time drinking
Who am I helping, what am I breaking
What am I giving, what am I taking?
But you try with your whole soul best
Never to think these thoughts and never to let
Them kind of thoughts gain ground
Or make your heart pound
But then again you know when they're around
Just waiting for a chance to slip and drop down
'Cause sometimes you hear 'em when the night time come creeping
And you fear they might catch you sleeping
And you jump from your bed, from the last chapter of dreamin'
And you can't remember for the best of your thinkin'
If that was you in the dream that was screaming
And you know that's somethin' special you're needin'
And you know there's no drug that'll do for the healing
And no liquor in the land to stop your brain from bleeding

You need somethin' special
You need somethin' special, all right
You need a fast flyin' train on a tornado track
To shoot you someplace and shoot you back
You need a cyclone wind on a stream engine howler
That's been banging and booming and blowing forever
That knows your troubles a hundred times over
You need a Greyhound bus that don't bar no race
That won't laugh at your looks
Your voice or your face
And by any number of bets in the book
Will be rolling long after the bubblegum craze
You need something to open up a new door
To show you something you seen before
But overlooked a hundred times or more
You need something to open your eyes
You need something to make it known
That it's you and no one else that owns
That spot that you're standing, that space that you're sitting
That the world ain't got you beat
That it ain't got you licked
It can't get you crazy no matter how many times you might get kicked
You need something special, all right
You need something special to give you hope
But hope's just a word
That maybe you said, maybe you heard
On some windy corner 'round a wide-angled curve

But that's what you need man, and you need it bad
And your trouble is you know it too good
'Cause you look an' you start gettin' the chills
'Cause you can't find it on a dollar bill
And it ain't on Macy's window sill
And it ain't on no rich kid's road map
And it ain't in no fat kid's fraternity house
And it ain't made in no Hollywood wheat germ
And it ain't on that dim-lit stage
With that half-wit comedian on it
Rantin' and ravin' and takin' your money
And you thinks it's funny
No, you can't find it neither in no night club, no yacht club
And it ain't in the seats of a supper club
And sure as hell you're bound to tell
No matter how hard you rub
You just ain't a-gonna find it on your ticket stub
No, it ain't in the rumors people're tellin' you
And it ain't in the pimple-lotion people are sellin' you
And it ain't in a cardboard-box house
Or down any movie star's blouse
And you can't find it on the golf course
And Uncle Remus can't tell you and neither can Santa Claus
And it ain't in the cream puff hairdo or cotton candy clothes
Ain't in the dime store dummies an' bubblegum goons
And it ain't in the marshmallow noises of the chocolate cake voices
That come knocking and tapping in Christmas wrapping
Sayin' ain't I pretty and ain't I cute, look at my skin,
Look at my skin shine, look at my skin glow,
Look at my skin laugh, look at my skin cry,
When you can't even sense if they got any insides
These people so pretty in their ribbons and bows
No, you'll not now or no other day
Find it on the doorsteps made of paper maché
And inside of the people made of molasses
That every other day buy a new pair of sunglasses
And it ain't in the fifty-star generals and flipped-out phonies
Who'd turn you in for a tenth of a penny
Who breathe and burp and bend and crack
And before you can count from one to ten
Do it all over again but this time behind your back, my friend,
The ones that wheel and deal and whirl and twirl
And play games with each other in their sand-box world
And you can't find it either in the no-talent fools
That run around gallant
And make all the rules for the ones that got talent
And it ain't in the ones that ain't got any talent but think they do
And think they're fooling you
The ones that jump on the wagon
Just for a while 'cause they know it's in style
To get their kicks, get out of it quick
And make all kinds of rnoney and chicks
And you yell to yourself and you throw down your hat
Saying, "Christ, do I gotta be like that?
Ain't there no one here that knows where I'm at
Ain't there no one here that knows how I feel
Good God Almighty, that stuff ain't real":

No, but that ain't your game, it ain't your race
You can't hear your name, you can't see your face
You gotta look some other place
And where do you look for this hope that you're seekin'
Where do you look for this lamp that's a-burnin'
Where do you look for this oil well gushin'
Where do you look for this candle that's glowin'
Where do you look for this hope that you know is there
And out there somewhere
And your feet can only walk down two kinds of roads
Your eyes can only look through two kinds of windows
Your nose can only smell two kinds of hallways
You can touch and twist
And turn two kinds of doorknobs
You can either go to the church of your choice
Or you go to Brooklyn State Hospital

You find God in the church of your choice
You find Woody Guthrie in Brooklyn State Hospital
And though it's only my opinion
I may be right or wrong
You'll find them both
In Grand Canyon
Sundown
The Wasteland ~ T.S. Eliot
I. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD

APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding	 
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing	 
Memory and desire, stirring	 
Dull roots with spring rain.	 
Winter kept us warm, covering	         5
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding	 
A little life with dried tubers.	 
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee	 
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,	 
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,	  10
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.	 
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch.	 
And when we were children, staying at the archduke's,	 
My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,	 
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,	  15
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.	 
In the mountains, there you feel free.	 
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.	 
 
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow	 
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,	  20
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only	 
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,	 
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,	 
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only	 
There is shadow under this red rock,	  25
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),	 
And I will show you something different from either	 
Your shadow at morning striding behind you	 
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;	 
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.	  30
                Frisch weht der Wind	 
                Der Heimat zu.	 
                Mein Irisch Kind,	 
                Wo weilest du?	 
'You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;	  35
'They called me the hyacinth girl.'	 
—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,	 
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not	 
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither	 
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,	  40
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.	 
Od' und leer das Meer.	 
 
Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,	 
Had a bad cold, nevertheless	 
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,	  45
With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,	 
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,	 
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)	 
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,	 
The lady of situations.	  50
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,	 
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,	 
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,	 
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find	 
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.	  55
I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.	 
Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,	 
Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:	 
One must be so careful these days.	 
 
Unreal City,	  60
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,	 
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,	 
I had not thought death had undone so many.	 
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,	 
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.	  65
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,	 
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours	 
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.	 
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying 'Stetson!	 
'You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!	  70
'That corpse you planted last year in your garden,	 
'Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?	 
'Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?	 
'Oh keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men,	 
'Or with his nails he'll dig it up again!	  75
'You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!'	 
 
II. A GAME OF CHESS

THE Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,	 
Glowed on the marble, where the glass	 
Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines	 
From which a golden Cupidon peeped out	  80
(Another hid his eyes behind his wing)	 
Doubled the flames of sevenbranched candelabra	 
Reflecting light upon the table as	 
The glitter of her jewels rose to meet it,	 
From satin cases poured in rich profusion;	  85
In vials of ivory and coloured glass	 
Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes,	 
Unguent, powdered, or liquid—troubled, confused	 
And drowned the sense in odours; stirred by the air	 
That freshened from the window, these ascended	  90
In fattening the prolonged candle-flames,	 
Flung their smoke into the laquearia,	 
Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling.	 
Huge sea-wood fed with copper	 
Burned green and orange, framed by the coloured stone,	  95
In which sad light a carvèd dolphin swam.	 
Above the antique mantel was displayed	 
As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene	 
The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king	 
So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale	 100
Filled all the desert with inviolable voice	 
And still she cried, and still the world pursues,	 
'Jug Jug' to dirty ears.	 
And other withered stumps of time	 
Were told upon the walls; staring forms	 105
Leaned out, leaning, hushing the room enclosed.	 
Footsteps shuffled on the stair.	 
Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair	 
Spread out in fiery points	 
Glowed into words, then would be savagely still.	 110
 
'My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.	 
'Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.	 
'What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?	 
'I never know what you are thinking. Think.'	 
 
I think we are in rats' alley	 115
Where the dead men lost their bones.	 
 
'What is that noise?'	 
                      The wind under the door.	 
'What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?'	 
                      Nothing again nothing.	 120
                                              'Do	 
'You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember	 
'Nothing?'	 
  I remember	 
Those are pearls that were his eyes.	 125
'Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?'	 
                                                         But	 
O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag—	 
It's so elegant	 
So intelligent	 130
'What shall I do now? What shall I do?'	 
'I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street	 
'With my hair down, so. What shall we do to-morrow?	 
'What shall we ever do?'	 
                          The hot water at ten.	 135
And if it rains, a closed car at four.	 
And we shall play a game of chess,	 
Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.	 
 
When Lil's husband got demobbed, I said—	 
I didn't mince my words, I said to her myself,	 140
HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME	 
Now Albert's coming back, make yourself a bit smart.	 
He'll want to know what you done with that money he gave you	 
To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was there.	 
You have them all out, Lil, and get a nice set,	 145
He said, I swear, I can't bear to look at you.	 
And no more can't I, I said, and think of poor Albert,	 
He's been in the army four years, he wants a good time,	 
And if you don't give it him, there's others will, I said.	 
Oh is there, she said. Something o' that, I said.	 150
Then I'll know who to thank, she said, and give me a straight look.	 
HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME	 
If you don't like it you can get on with it, I said.	 
Others can pick and choose if you can't.	 
But if Albert makes off, it won't be for lack of telling.	 155
You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique.	 
(And her only thirty-one.)	 
I can't help it, she said, pulling a long face,	 
It's them pills I took, to bring it off, she said.	 
(She's had five already, and nearly died of young George.)	 160
The chemist said it would be alright, but I've never been the same.	 
You are a proper fool, I said.	 
Well, if Albert won't leave you alone, there it is, I said,	 
What you get married for if you don't want children?	 
HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME	 165
Well, that Sunday Albert was home, they had a hot gammon,	 
And they asked me in to dinner, to get the beauty of it hot—	 
HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME	 
HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME	 
Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight.	 170
Ta ta. Goonight. Goonight.	 
Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night.	 
 
III. THE FIRE SERMON

THE river's tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf	 
Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind	 
Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed.	 175
Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.	 
The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,	 
Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends	 
Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed.	 
And their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors;	 180
Departed, have left no addresses.	 
By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept...	 
Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,	 
Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long.	 
But at my back in a cold blast I hear	 185
The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.	 
 
A rat crept softly through the vegetation	 
Dragging its slimy belly on the bank	 
While I was fishing in the dull canal	 
On a winter evening round behind the gashouse	 190
Musing upon the king my brother's wreck	 
And on the king my father's death before him.	 
White bodies naked on the low damp ground	 
And bones cast in a little low dry garret,	 
Rattled by the rat's foot only, year to year.	 195
But at my back from time to time I hear	 
The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring	 
Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring.	 
O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter	 
And on her daughter	 200
They wash their feet in soda water	 
Et, O ces voix d'enfants, chantant dans la coupole!	 
 
Twit twit twit	 
Jug jug jug jug jug jug	 
So rudely forc'd.	 205
Tereu	 
 
Unreal City	 
Under the brown fog of a winter noon	 
Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant	 
Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants	 210
C.i.f. London: documents at sight,	 
Asked me in demotic French	 
To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel	 
Followed by a weekend at the Metropole.	 
 
At the violet hour, when the eyes and back	 215
Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits	 
Like a taxi throbbing waiting,	 
I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,	 
Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see	 
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives	 220
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,	 
The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights	 
Her stove, and lays out food in tins.	 
Out of the window perilously spread	 
Her drying combinations touched by the sun's last rays,	 225
On the divan are piled (at night her bed)	 
Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays.	 
I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs	 
Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest—	 
I too awaited the expected guest.	 230
He, the young man carbuncular, arrives,	 
A small house agent's clerk, with one bold stare,	 
One of the low on whom assurance sits	 
As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.	 
The time is now propitious, as he guesses,	 235
The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,	 
Endeavours to engage her in caresses	 
Which still are unreproved, if undesired.	 
Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;	 
Exploring hands encounter no defence;	 240
His vanity requires no response,	 
And makes a welcome of indifference.	 
(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all	 
Enacted on this same divan or bed;	 
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall	 245
And walked among the lowest of the dead.)	 
Bestows on final patronising kiss,	 
And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit...	 
 
She turns and looks a moment in the glass,	 
Hardly aware of her departed lover;	 250
Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass:	 
'Well now that's done: and I'm glad it's over.'	 
When lovely woman stoops to folly and	 
Paces about her room again, alone,	 
She smoothes her hair with automatic hand,	 255
And puts a record on the gramophone.	 
 
'This music crept by me upon the waters'	 
And along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street.	 
O City city, I can sometimes hear	 
Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street,	 260
The pleasant whining of a mandoline	 
And a clatter and a chatter from within	 
Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls	 
Of Magnus Martyr hold	 
Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold.	 265
 
      The river sweats	 
      Oil and tar	 
      The barges drift	 
      With the turning tide	 
      Red sails	 270
      Wide	 
      To leeward, swing on the heavy spar.	 
      The barges wash	 
      Drifting logs	 
      Down Greenwich reach	 275
      Past the Isle of Dogs.	 
            Weialala leia	 
            Wallala leialala	 
 
      Elizabeth and Leicester	 
      Beating oars	 280
      The stern was formed	 
      A gilded shell	 
      Red and gold	 
      The brisk swell	 
      Rippled both shores	 285
      Southwest wind	 
      Carried down stream	 
      The peal of bells	 
      White towers	 
            Weialala leia	 290
            Wallala leialala	 
 
'Trams and dusty trees.	 
Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew	 
Undid me. By Richmond I raised my knees	 
Supine on the floor of a narrow canoe.'	 295
'My feet are at Moorgate, and my heart	 
Under my feet. After the event	 
He wept. He promised "a new start".	 
I made no comment. What should I resent?'	 
'On Margate Sands.	 300
I can connect	 
Nothing with nothing.	 
The broken fingernails of dirty hands.	 
My people humble people who expect	 
Nothing.'	 305
      la la	 
 
To Carthage then I came	 
 
Burning burning burning burning	 
O Lord Thou pluckest me out	 
O Lord Thou pluckest	 310
 
burning	 
 
IV. DEATH BY WATER

PHLEBAS the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,	 
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep seas swell	 
And the profit and loss.	 
                          A current under sea	 315
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell	 
He passed the stages of his age and youth	 
Entering the whirlpool.	 
                          Gentile or Jew	 
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,	 320
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.	 
 
V. WHAT THE THUNDER SAID

AFTER the torchlight red on sweaty faces	 
After the frosty silence in the gardens	 
After the agony in stony places	 
The shouting and the crying	 325
Prison and place and reverberation	 
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains	 
He who was living is now dead	 
We who were living are now dying	 
With a little patience	 330
 
Here is no water but only rock	 
Rock and no water and the sandy road	 
The road winding above among the mountains	 
Which are mountains of rock without water	 
If there were water we should stop and drink	 335
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think	 
Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand	 
If there were only water amongst the rock	 
Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit	 
Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit	 340
There is not even silence in the mountains	 
But dry sterile thunder without rain	 
There is not even solitude in the mountains	 
But red sullen faces sneer and snarl	 
From doors of mudcracked houses
                                 If there were water	 345
  And no rock	 
  If there were rock	 
  And also water	 
  And water	 
  A spring	 350
  A pool among the rock	 
  If there were the sound of water only	 
  Not the cicada	 
  And dry grass singing	 
  But sound of water over a rock	 355
  Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees	 
  Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop	 
  But there is no water	 
 
Who is the third who walks always beside you?	 
When I count, there are only you and I together	 360
But when I look ahead up the white road	 
There is always another one walking beside you	 
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded	 
I do not know whether a man or a woman	 
—But who is that on the other side of you?	 365
 
What is that sound high in the air	 
Murmur of maternal lamentation	 
Who are those hooded hordes swarming	 
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth	 
Ringed by the flat horizon only	 370
What is the city over the mountains	 
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air	 
Falling towers	 
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria	 
Vienna London	 375
Unreal	 
 
A woman drew her long black hair out tight	 
And fiddled whisper music on those strings	 
And bats with baby faces in the violet light	 
Whistled, and beat their wings	 380
And crawled head downward down a blackened wall	 
And upside down in air were towers	 
Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours	 
And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.	 
 
In this decayed hole among the mountains	 385
In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing	 
Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel	 
There is the empty chapel, only the wind's home.	 
It has no windows, and the door swings,	 
Dry bones can harm no one.	 390
Only a cock stood on the rooftree	 
Co co rico co co rico	 
In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust	 
Bringing rain	 
 
Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves	 395
Waited for rain, while the black clouds	 
Gathered far distant, over Himavant.	 
The jungle crouched, humped in silence.	 
Then spoke the thunder	 
D A	 400
Datta: what have we given?	 
My friend, blood shaking my heart	 
The awful daring of a moment's surrender	 
Which an age of prudence can never retract	 
By this, and this only, we have existed	 405
Which is not to be found in our obituaries	 
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider	 
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor	 
In our empty rooms	 
D A	 410
Dayadhvam: I have heard the key	 
Turn in the door once and turn once only	 
We think of the key, each in his prison	 
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison	 
Only at nightfall, aetherial rumours	 415
Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus	 
D A	 
Damyata: The boat responded	 
Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar	 
The sea was calm, your heart would have responded	 420
Gaily, when invited, beating obedient	 
To controlling hands	 
 
                      I sat upon the shore	 
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me	 
Shall I at least set my lands in order?	 425
 
London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down	 
 
Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina	 
Quando fiam ceu chelidon—O swallow swallow	 
Le Prince d'Aquitaine à la tour abolie	 
These fragments I have shored against my ruins	 430
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe.	 
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.	 
 
            Shantih shantih shantih
Howl ~ Allen Ginsberg
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by 
madness, starving hysterical naked, 
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn 
looking for an angry fix, 
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly 
connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, 
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat 
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of 
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities 
contemplating jazz, 
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and 
saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated, 
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes 
hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy 
among the scholars of war, 
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & 
publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, 
burning their money in wastebaskets and listening 
to the Terror through the wall, 
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through 
Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York, 
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in 
Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their 
torsos night after night 
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares,
alcohol and cock and endless balls, 
incomparable blind; streets of shuddering cloud and 
lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson,
illuminating all the motionless world of Time between, 
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery 
dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, 
storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon 
blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree 
vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn,
ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind, 
who chained themselves to subways for the endless 
ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine 
until the noise of wheels and children brought 
them down shuddering mouth-wracked and 
battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance 
in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's 
floated out and sat through the stale beer after
noon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack 
of doom on the hydrogen jukebox, 
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to 
pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge, 
lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping 
down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills 
off Empire State out of the moon, 
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts 
and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks 
and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars, 
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days 
and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the 
Synagogue cast on the pavement, 
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a 
trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall, 
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grind-ings and 
migraines of China under junk-with-drawal in Newark's bleak furnished room, 
who wandered around and around at midnight in the 
railroad yard wondering where to go, and went, 
leaving no broken hearts, 
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing 
through snow toward lonesome farms in grand-father night, 
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy 
and bop kabbalah because the cosmos instinctively 
vibrated at their feet in Kansas, 
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary 
indian angels who were visionary indian angels, 
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore 
gleamed in supernatural ecstasy, 
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight street
light smalltown rain, 
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston 
seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the 
brilliant Spaniard to converse about America 
and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa, 
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving 
behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees 
and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago, 
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the 
F.B.I. in beards and shorts with big pacifist 
eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets, 
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting 
the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism, 
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union 
Square weeping and undressing while the sirens 
of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed 
down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed, 
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked 
and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons, 
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight 
in policecars for committing no crime but their 
own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication, 
who howled on their knees in the subway and were 
dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts, 
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly 
motorcyclists, and screamed with joy, 
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, 
the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love, 
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rose
gardens and the grass of public parks and 
cemeteries scattering their semen freely to 
whomever come who may, 
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up 
with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath 
when the blond & naked angel came to pierce 
them with a sword, 
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate 
the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar 
the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb 
and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but 
sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden 
threads of the craftsman's loom, 
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of 
beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued along 
the floor and down the hall and ended fainting 
on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and 
come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness, 
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling 
in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning 
but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sun
rise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake, 
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad 
stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these 
poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver-joy 
to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls 
in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses' 
 rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with 
gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station 
solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too, 
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in 
dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and 
picked themselves up out of basements hung
over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third 
Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices, 
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on 
the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the 
East River to open to a room full of steamheat and opium, 
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment 
cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime 
blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall 
be crowned with laurel in oblivion, 
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested 
the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of Bowery, 
who wept at the romance of the streets with their 
pushcarts full of onions and bad music, 
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the 
bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts, 
who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned 
with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded 
by orange crates of theology, 
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty 
incantations which in the yellow morning were 
stanzas of gibberish, 
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht 
& tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom, 
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg, 
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot 
for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks 
fell on their heads every day for the next decade, 
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique 
stores where they thought they were growing 
old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits 
on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse 
& the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments 
of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the 
fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the 
drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality, 
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten 
into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alley
ways & firetrucks, not even one free beer, 
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of 
the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, 
cried all over the street, 
danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed 
phonograph records of nostalgic European 
1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and 
threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans 
in their ears and the blast of colossal steam whistles, 
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying 
to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude 
watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation, 
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out 
if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had 
a vision to find out Eternity, 
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who 
came back to Denver & waited in vain, who 
watched over Denver & brooded & loned in 
Denver and finally went away to find out the 
Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying 
for each other's salvation and light and breasts, 
until the soul illuminated its hair for a second, 
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for 
impossible criminals with golden heads and the 
charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet 
blues to Alcatraz, 
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky 
Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys 
or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or 
Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the 
daisychain or grave, 
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hyp
notism & were left with their insanity & their 
hands & a hung jury, 
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism 
and subsequently presented themselves on the 
granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads 
and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy, 
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin 
Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational 
therapy pingpong & amnesia, 
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic 
pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of 
blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible mad
man doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East, 
Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid 
halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, 
rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench 
dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, 
bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon, 
with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book 
flung out of the tenement window, and the last 
door closed at 4. A.M. and the last telephone 
slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room 
emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, 
a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet, 
and even that imaginary, 
nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and 
now you're really in the total animal soup of time
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed 
with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use 
of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrating plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space 
through images juxtaposed, and trapped the 
archangel of the soul between 2 visual images 
and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun 
and dash of consciousness together jumping 
with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus 
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human 
prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent 
and shaking with shame, 
rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm 
of thought in his naked and endless head, 
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, 
yet putting down here what might be left to say 
in time come after death, 
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in 
the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the 
suffering of America's naked mind for love into 
an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone 
cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio 
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered 
out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open 
their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? 
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unob
tainable dollars! Children screaming under the 
stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men 
weeping in the parks! 
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the 
loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy 
judger of men! 
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the 
crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of 
sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! 
Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments! 
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose 
blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers 
are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! 
Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb! 
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! 
Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long 
streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories 
dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose 
smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch 
whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch 
whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch 
whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! 
Moloch whose name is the Mind! 
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream 
Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in 
Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch! 
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom 
I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch 
who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! 
Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! 
Light streaming out of the sky! 
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! 
skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic 
industries! spectral nations! invincible mad 
houses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs! 
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pave-
ments, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to 
Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us! 
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! 
gone down the American river! 
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole 
boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! 
gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! 
Ten years' animal screams and suicides! 
Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on 
the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the 
wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! 
They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! 
carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!
Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland 
where you're madder than I am 
I'm with you in Rockland 
where you must feel very strange 
I'm with you in Rockland 
where you imitate the shade of my mother 
I'm with you in Rockland 
where you've murdered your twelve secretaries 
I'm with you in Rockland 
where you laugh at this invisible humor 
I'm with you in Rockland 
where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter 
I'm with you in Rockland 
where your condition has become serious and 
is reported on the radio 
I'm with you in Rockland 
where the faculties of the skull no longer admit 
the worms of the senses 
I'm with you in Rockland 
where you drink the tea of the breasts of the 
spinsters of Utica 
I'm with you in Rockland 
where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the 
harpies of the Bronx 
I'm with you in Rockland 
where you scream in a straightjacket that you're 
losing the game of the actual pingpong of the abyss 
I'm with you in Rockland 
where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul 
is innocent and immortal it should never die 
ungodly in an armed madhouse 
I'm with you in Rockland 
where fifty more shocks will never return your 
soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a 
cross in the void 
I'm with you in Rockland 
where you accuse your doctors of insanity and 
plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the 
fascist national Golgotha 
I'm with you in Rockland 
where you will split the heavens of Long Island 
and resurrect your living human Jesus from the 
superhuman tomb 
I'm with you in Rockland 
where there are twenty-five-thousand mad com-
rades all together singing the final stanzas of 
the Internationale 
I'm with you in Rockland 
where we hug and kiss the United States under 
our bedsheets the United States that coughs all 
night and won't let us sleep 
I'm with you in Rockland 
where we wake up electrified out of the coma 
by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the 
roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the 
hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse 
O skinny legions run outside O starry
spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is 
here O victory forget your underwear we're free 
I'm with you in Rockland 
in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-
journey on the highway across America in tears 
to the door of my cottage in the Western night
An Author to Her Book ~ Anne Bradstreet
Thou ill-form'd offspring of my feeble brain,
Who after birth did'st by my side remain,
Till snatcht from thence by friends, less wise than true,
Who thee abroad expos'd to public view,
Made thee in rags, halting to th' press to trudge,
Where errors were not lessened (all may judge).
At thy return my blushing was not small,
My rambling brat (in print) should mother call.
I cast thee by as one unfit for light,
Thy Visage was so irksome in my sight,
Yet being mine own, at length affection would
Thy blemishes amend, if so I could.
I wash'd thy face, but more defects I saw,
And rubbing off a spot, still made a flaw.
I stretcht thy joints to make thee even feet,
Yet still thou run'st more hobbling than is meet.
In better dress to trim thee was my mind,
But nought save home-spun Cloth, i' th' house I find.
In this array, 'mongst Vulgars mayst thou roam.
In Critics' hands, beware thou dost not come,
And take thy way where yet thou art not known.
If for thy Father askt, say, thou hadst none;
And for thy Mother, she alas is poor,
Which caus'd her thus to send thee out of door. 
216 ~ Emily Dickenson
Safe in their Alabaster Chambers --
Untouched my Morning
And untouched by Noon --
Sleep the meek members of the Resurrection --
Rafter of satin,
And Roof of stone.

Light laughs the breeze
In her Castle above them --
Babbles the Bee in a stolid Ear,
Pipe the Sweet Birds in ignorant cadence --
Ah, what sagacity perished here!
632 ~ Emily Dickinson
The Brain -- is wider than the Sky --
For -- put them side by side --
The one the other will contain
With ease -- and You -- beside --

The Brain is deeper than the sea --
For -- hold them -- Blue to Blue --
The one the other will absorb --
As Sponges -- Buckets -- do --

The Brain is just the weight of God --
For -- Heft them -- Pound for Pound --
And they will differ -- if they do --
As Syllable from Sound --
Mending Wall ~ Robert Frost
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it
And spills the upper boulder in the sun,
And make gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there,
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
"Stay where you are until our backs are turned!"
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There were it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, "Good fences make good neighbors."
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
"Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down." I could say "Elves" to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there,
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having though of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."
Of Modern Poetry ~ Wallace Stevens
The poem of the mind in the act of finding
What will suffice. It has not always had
To find: the scene was set; it repeated what
Was in the script.
Then the theatre was changed
To something else. Its past was a souvenir.

It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.
It has to face the men of the time and to meet
The women of the time. It has to think about war
And it has to find what will suffice. It has
To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage,
And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and
With meditation, speak words that in the ear,
In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat,
Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound
Of which, an invisible audience listens,
Not to the play, but to itself, expressed
In an emotion as of two people, as of two
Emotions becoming one. The actor is
A metaphysician in the dark, twanging
An instrument, twanging a wiry string that gives
Sounds passing through sudden rightnesses, wholly
Containing the mind, below which it cannot descend,
Beyond which it has no will to rise.
It must
Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may
Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman
Combing. The poem of the act of the mind. 
The Four Ages of Man ~ W.B. Yeats
He with body waged a fight,
But body won; it walks upright.

Then he struggled with he heart;
Innocence and peace depart.

Then he struggled with the mind;
His proud heart he left behind.

Now his wars on God begin;
At stroke of midnight God shall win.
The Second Coming ~ W.B. Yeats
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? 
In s Station of the Metro ~ Ezra Pound
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;	 
Petals on a wet, black bough.
The School-Boy ~ William Blake
I love to rise in a summer morn,
When the birds sing on every tree;
The distant huntsman winds his horn,
And the skylark sings with me:
O what sweet company!

But to go to school in a summer morn, -
O it drives all joy away!
Under a cruel eye outworn,
The little ones spend the day
In sighing and dismay.

Ah then at times I drooping sit,
And spend many an anxious hour;
Nor in my book can I take delight,
Nor sit in learning's bower,
Worn through with the dreary shower.

How can the bird that is born for joy
Sit in a cage and sing?
How can a child, when fears annoy,
But droop his tender wing,
And forget his youthful spring!

O father and mother if buds are nipped,
And blossoms blown away;
And if the tender plants are stripped
Of their joy in the springing day,
By sorrow and care's dismay, -

How shall the summer arise in joy,
Or the summer fruits appear?
Or how shall we gather what griefs destroy,
Or bless the mellowing year,
When the blasts of winter appear?
Tintern Abbey ~ William Wordsworth
Five years have past; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a soft inland murmur.--Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
That on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.
The day is come when I again repose
Here, under this dark sycamore, and view                        
These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts,
Which at this season, with their unripe fruits,
Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves
'Mid groves and copses. Once again I see
These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines
Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms,
Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke
Sent up, in silence, from among the trees!
With some uncertain notice, as might seem
Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,                     
Or of some Hermit's cave, where by his fire
The Hermit sits alone.
                        These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration:--feelings too                        
Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,                               
Is lightened:--that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,--
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.
                                 If this
Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft--                        
In darkness and amid the many shapes
Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,
Have hung upon the beatings of my heart--
How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee,
O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro' the woods,
How often has my spirit turned to thee!
And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought,
With many recognitions dim and faint,
And somewhat of a sad perplexity,                               
The picture of the mind revives again:
While here I stand, not only with the sense
Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts
That in this moment there is life and food
For future years. And so I dare to hope,
Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first
I came among these hills; when like a roe
I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides
Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,
Wherever nature led: more like a man                            
Flying from something that he dreads, than one
Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then
(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days,
And their glad animal movements all gone by)
To me was all in all.--I cannot paint
What then I was. The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were then to me
An appetite; a feeling and a love,                              
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye.--That time is past,
And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this
Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur, other gifts
Have followed; for such loss, I would believe,
Abundant recompence. For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes                    
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels                             
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear,--both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
In nature and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul                  
Of all my moral being.
                        Nor perchance,
If I were not thus taught, should I the more
Suffer my genial spirits to decay:
For thou art with me here upon the banks
Of this fair river; thou my dearest Friend,
My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch
The language of my former heart, and read
My former pleasures in the shooting lights
Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while
May I behold in thee what I was once,                          
My dear, dear Sister! and this prayer I make,
Knowing that Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege,
Through all the years of this our life, to lead
From joy to joy: for she can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all                    
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb
Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold
Is full of blessings. Therefore let the moon
Shine on thee in thy solitary walk;
And let the misty mountain-winds be free
To blow against thee: and, in after years,
When these wild ecstasies shall be matured
Into a sober pleasure; when thy mind
Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms,                       
Thy memory be as a dwelling-place
For all sweet sounds and harmonies; oh! then,
If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief,
Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts
Of tender joy wilt thou remember me,
And these my exhortations! Nor, perchance--
If I should be where I no more can hear
Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams
Of past existence--wilt thou then forget
That on the banks of this delightful stream                    
We stood together; and that I, so long
A worshipper of Nature, hither came
Unwearied in that service: rather say
With warmer love--oh! with far deeper zeal
Of holier love. Nor wilt thou then forget,
That after many wanderings, many years
Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs,
And this green pastoral landscape, were to me
More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake!                                                        
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One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, 
see a fine picture, and if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words. 
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ~