PolyArchive

In Memory of W. B. Yeats W. H. Auden I He disappeared in the dead of winter: The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted, And snow disfigured the public statues; The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day. What instruments we have agree The day of his death was a dark cold […]

Epilogue Robert Lowell Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme— why are they no help to me now I want to make something imagined, not recalled? I hear the noise of my own voice: The painter’s vision is not a lens, it trembles to caress the light. But sometimes everything I write with the threadbare art […]

Karl: Okay, I have another question. I could answer myself but I would like to ask you. What is your idea of a perfect day? Karl: Every day should be perfect. It’s up to you to work on it and to make the day perfect. There is no perfect day. It is a very sad […]

It started, as many things do, with Metafilter. Someone posted a link to a story which quickly engaged me (at one of those thesis-work moments during which I want nothing more than to be distracted), about a blogger facing down her stalker. It was a gripping and well-written story–I read every part in one sitting. […]

(wrenched from a geocities site in the depths of the Wayback Machine) I N T R O D U C T I O N The poems to come are for you and for me and are not for mostpeople– it’s no use trying to pretend that mostpeople and ourselves are alike. Mostpeople have less in […]

I have been writing. Just in very small form. 7-7-10: Raw temptation of sprinklers never fades with age… Wet grass loves bare feet 7-1-10: Red-winged blackbird dreams, Bicycles, reeds in ditches, was this history? 6-16-10: Blame music, you could never live up to sacred memories of you June 3, 2010: ‘Late submission’ Priorities change. Scarlett […]

Written from a hospital bed in 1875, after the 26-year-old Henley had had his leg amputated as a result of tuberculosis of the bone. Originally untitled, Arthur Quiller-Couch bestowed the name “Invictus” (“Unvanquished”) when he included it in The Oxford Book of English Verse. This was the poem Nelson Mandela kept on a scrap of […]

A Psalm of Life What the Heart of the Young Man Said to the Psalmist Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 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 […]

I recite this to myself, every time I am on an airplane. AN IRISH AIRMAN FORESEES HIS DEATH W. B. Yeats I know that I shall meet my fate Somewhere among the clouds above; Those that I fight I do not hate, Those that I guard I do not love; My country is Kiltartan Cross, […]

LIFE’S TRAGEDY Paul Laurence Dunbar It may be misery not to sing at all And to go silent through the brimming day. It may be sorrow never to be loved, But deeper griefs than these beset the way. To have come near to sing the perfect song And only by a half-tone lost the key, […]

The Light of Stars Henry Wadsworth Longfellow The night is come, but not too soon; And sinking silently, All silently, the little moon Drops down behind the sky. There is no light in earth or heaven But the cold light of stars; And the first watch of the night is given To the red planet […]

the lesson of the moth Don Marquis i was talking to a moth the other evening he was trying to break into an electric light bulb and fry himself on the wires why do you fellows pull this stunt i asked him because it is the conventional thing for moths or why if that had […]

The Waking Theodore Roethke I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I feel my fate in what I cannot fear. I learn by going where I have to go. We think by feeling. What is there to know? I hear my being dance from ear to ear. I wake to sleep, and take […]

Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening Robert Frost Whose woods these are I think I know His house is in the village though; He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow. My little horse must think it queer To stop without a farmhouse near Between the woods […]

SPOTKANIE Czesław Miłosz Jechaliśmy przed świtem po zamarzłych polach, Czerwone skrzydło wstawało, jeszcze noc. I zając przebiegł nagle tuż przed nami, A jeden z nas pokazał go ręką. To było dawno. Dzisiaj już nie żyją Ni zając, ani ten co go wskazywał. Miłości moja, gdzież są, dokąd idą Błysk ręki, linia biegu, szelest grud — […]