PolyArchive

October Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872 –1906) October is the treasurer of the year, And all the months pay bounty to her store; The fields and orchards still their tribute bear, And fill her brimming coffers more and more But she, with youthful lavishness, Spends all her wealth in gaudy dress, And decks herself in garments […]

The Summer Day Mary Oliver Who made the world? Who made the swan, and the black bear? Who made the grasshopper? This grasshopper, I mean— the one who has flung herself out of the grass, the one who is eating sugar out of my hand, who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of […]

Ode to the West Wind Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) I O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being, Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing, Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou, Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed The […]

Wild Geese Mary Oliver You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile […]

The Sky is Low, the Clouds are Mean Emily Dickinson The Sky is low — the Clouds are mean. A Travelling Flake of Snow Across a Barn or through a Rut Debates if it will go — A Narrow Wind complains all Day How some one treated him Nature, like Us, is sometimes caught Without her Diadem […]

Skunk Hour Robert Lowell Nautilus Island’s hermit heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage; her sheep still graze above the sea. Her son’s a bishop. Her farmer is first selectman in our village; she’s in her dotage. Thirsting for the hierarchic privacy of Queen Victoria’s century, she buys up all the eyesores facing […]

may my heart always be open e. e. cummings may my heart always be open to little birds who are the secrets of living whatever they sing is better than to know and if men should not hear them men are old may my mind stroll about hungry and fearless and thirsty and supple and […]

Lines Lost among Trees Billy Collins These are not the lines that came to me while walking in the woods with no pen and nothing to write on anyway. They are gone forever, a handful of coins dropped through the grate of memory, along with the ingenious mnemonic I devised to hold them in place- […]

The Force that through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower Dylan Thomas The force that through the green fuse drives the flower Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees Is my destroyer. And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose My youth is bent by the same wintry fever. The force […]

Song of the Brook Alfred, Lord Tennyson From “The Brook: an Idyl” I COME from haunts of coot and hern: I make a sudden sally And sparkle out among the fern, To bicker down a valley. By thirty hills I hurry down, 5 Or slip between the ridges, By twenty thorps, a little town, And […]

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 […]