2 Form: Free verse.
1 Form: Blank verse—Notes: Here the room is most likely the room of a dead child.
2 Form: Free verse—Vocabulary: Parkside: restaurant.
1 Form: Free verse.
1 Form: Free verse—Vocabulary: Dry Tortugas: islands west of Key West in Florida; kingfisher: type of large bird; Bonaparte gulls: type of gull that nests in trees; Myer’s and Appleton Gold: types of rum.
1 Form: Sonnet—Vocabulary: Two Buck Chuck: Charles Schaw Merlot, selling for $2 per bottle.
1 Form: Free verse.
2 Form: Free verse—Notes: A poem that describes the slow loss of hearing with aging.
1 Form: Free verse—Vocabulary: Therese Raquin: protagonist in Opera of the same name. She and her lover kill her husband, whose ghost then haunts them; Rigoletto: Main character in opera of the same name, he ends up mistakenly arranging to have his daughter Gilda killed; Butterfly: main character in Madam Butterfly. She waits for the return of her lover but to no avail, and ends up killing herself.
1 Form: Iambic, irregular line lengths—Vocabulary: sconces: lights attached to walls.
2 Form: Free verse.
1 Form: Free verse.
1 Form: Free verse.
1 Form: Free verse—Vocabulary: Impala: model of car; Barracuda: model of car; rig: truck; Mercury Montego: brand of car; LTD: brand of car; shammy: soft leather cloth—Notes: Although not explicitly stated, the brother died in a motorcycle crash.
1 Form: Free verse—Notes: This poem defies simple analysis, because the ark is a symbol and it can represent many things. Examples include your own body (and thus, your life); a political party in power; or even the Earth.
2 Form: Free verse.
1 Form: Free verse—Vocabulary: wolftail: brush.
1 Form: Prose poem.
1 Form: Free verse.
1 Form: Sonnet with relaxed form—Vocabulary: Transformatrix: a made-up word implying transformation and relationships; stiletto: slender dagger; safe word: word used in bondage games to stop the game; trusses up: ties up—Notes: The sonnet form is considered by most poets to be the most restrictive, and here that sense of the form is compared to a bondage scene.
2 Form: Iambic, mostly tetrameter but varying—Vocabulary: football strips: soccer uniforms; Owen: WWI British War Poet; Boche: derogatory phrase for Germans; pike: long spear; grapeshot: small iron balls used in cannons.
1 Form: Free verse.
1 Form: Free verse—Notes: What the narrator learned about history was learned more from the experiences the teacher shared than from the textbook, but perhaps the most important lesson was that no-one in life can avoid pain.
1 Form: Free verse—Notes: Notice the changing meaning of the word free, starting with available without payment, then released, then abandoned, and finally, the forcibly cast off.
1 Form: Free verse—Vocabulary: crone: old woman.
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
Introduction
Level Four Poetry Manifesto
Organization of the Poems
A Note on Meter
A Request for Understanding and Assistance
Poems
Unknown (possibly 4,000 BC)
Ishtar
Archilochos (circa 700 BC – 650 BC)
Will, lost in a sea of trouble
The Bible
Address of Ruth to Naomi
Mei Sheng (Circe 140 BC)
The Beautiful Toilet
Horace (65 BC – 8 BC)
The young bloods come less often now
Norse Myth (circa 50 BC)
from The Longbeards’ Saga
Petronius Arbiter (27 AD – 66 AD)
Doing, a filthy pleasure is, and short
Tao Yuan-ming (To-Em-Mei) (365-427)
The Unmoving Cloud
Li Po (701 – 762)
The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter
Omar Khayam (1044-1123)
XI
XXIII
XXVIII
LI
Moritake (1452 – 1540)
One fallen flower
Sir Philip Sidney (1554 – 1586)
A Ditty
Be Your Words Made, Good Sir of Indian Ware
Loving in Truth
To Sleep
Robert Greene (1560 – 1592)
Content
Michael Drayton (1563-1631)
Love’s Farewell
William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
All the World’s a Stage
Sonnet XVII
Sonnet XVIII
Sonnet XXXII
Sonnet LV
Sonnet CXXX
Sonnet CXXXVIII
Sonnet CXLIII
Sonnet CXLVII
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
Thomas Campion (1567 – 1619)
Integer Vitae
Sir Henry Wotton (1568 – 1639)
Upon the Death of Sir Albert Morton’s Wife
John Donne (1572-1631)
Community
Confined Love
Death
The Computation
The Curse
William Drummond (1585 – 1649)
Life
Robert Herrick (1591 – 1674)
To the Virgins
Upon Julia’s Clothes
Thomas Carew (1595 – 1639)
Ingrateful Beauty Threatened
John Milton (1608 – 1674)
On His Blindness
Sir John Suckling (1609 – 1642)
Song: Why so pale and wan, fond lover?
Abraham Cowley (1618 – 1667)
Drinking
Richard Lovelace (1618 – 1658)
To Lucasta, On Going to the Wars
William Walsh (1663 – 1708)
Love and Jealousy
William Congreve (1670 – 1729)
False though she be to me and love
Ryusui (1691 – 1758)
A lost child crying
Jokun (circa 1700)
Ah! I intended
William Blake (1757 - 1827)
The Garden of Love
The Sick Rose
The Tiger
To See a World in a Grain of Sand
Robert Burns (1759 1796)
Epitaph for James Smith
Epitaph on a Henpecked Squire
Epitaph on William Muir
Inconstancy in love
To A Louse
To A Mountain Daisy
William Wordsworth (1770 – 1850)
I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud
Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room
The Solitary Reaper
We are Seven
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 – 1834)
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Robert Southey (1774 – 1843)
After Blenheim
The Scholar
Walter Savage Landor (1775 – 1864)
On His Seventy-Fifth Birthday
Well I Remember
Thomas Moore (1779 – 1852)
An Argument
‘Tis the Last Rose of Summer
George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788 – 1824)
She Walks in Beauty
So, we’ll go no more a-roving
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 – 1822)
Music
Mutability
Song from Charles the First
Ozymandias
John Clare (1793 – 1864)
Badger
William Cullen Bryant (1794 – 1878)
A Presentiment
Mutation
Thanatopsis
The Hurricane
The Murdered Traveler
The Poet
The Strange Lady
To a Waterfowl
John Keats (1795 – 1821)
Isabella
La B
elle Dame Sans Merci
O Blush Not So
This living hand, now warm and capable 1
Ode on a Grecian Urn
Thomas Hood (1799 – 1845)
The Poet’s Fate
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882)
Days
Hamatreya
The Rhodora
The Snow-Storm
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806 – 1861)
Sonnets from the Portuguese – I
Sonnets from the Portuguese – XIV
Sonnets from the Portuguese – XX
Sonnets from the Portuguese – XLIII
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807 – 1882)
A Nameless Grave
Jugurtha
Killed at the Ford
King Witlaf’s Drinking-Horn
Nature
The Beleaguered City
The Fire of Drift-Wood
The Landlord’s Tale
The Phantom Ship
The Potter’s Wheel
The Rainy Day
The Three Silences of Molinos
Travels by the Fireside
Twilight
John Greenleaf Whittier (1807 – 1892)
Autumn Thoughts
By their Works
Forgiveness
Trust
Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809 – 1894)
Sun and Shadow
Edgar Allan Poe (1809 – 1849)
Annabel Lee
For Annie
The Raven
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809 – 1892)
Come Not, When I am Dead
Home They Brought Her Warrior Dead
The Charge of the Light Brigade
Vivien’s Song
Robert Browning (1812 – 1889)
A Toccata of Galuppi’s
Meeting at Night
My Last Duchess
Never the Time and the Place
Porphyria’s Lover
The Confessional
The Pied Piper of Hamelin
Edward Lear (1812 – 1888)
The Owl and the Pussy-Cat
Emily Bronte (1818 – 1848)
I am the Only Being Whose Doom
Charles Kingsley (1819 – 1875)
Young and Old
Walt Whitman (1819 – 1892)
Darest Thou Now O Soul
I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing
My Legacy
O Captain! My Captain
Song of Prudence
This Compost
When I heard the Learn’d Astronomer
Charles Baudelaire (1821 – 1867)
A Carrion
from Fuses I – on Love
from Fuses I – on Art
from Fuses I – on God
Heautontimoroumenos
Metamorphoses of the Vampire
Spleen
The Flask
The Ghostly Visitant
The Murderer’s Wine
The Pit
The Vampire
Coventry Patmore (1823 – 1896)
The Toys
Richard Henry Stoddard (1805 – 1923)
The Jar
Emily Dickinson (1830 – 1886)
A deed knocks first at thought
A narrow fellow in the grass
A word is dead
After great pain a formal feeling comes
Apparently with no surprise
Because I could not stop for death
Hope is the thing with feathers
I felt a funeral in my brain
I had been hungry all the years
I heard a fly buzz when I died
I like to see it lap the miles
I taste a liquor never brewed
I’m nobody! Who are you?
I’ve Known a Heaven, Like a Tent
My life closed twice before its close
The Last Night
The Props Assist the House
The way I read a letter’s this
There came a wind like a bugle
There’s a certain slant of light
To make a prairie it takes a clover
We Grow Accustomed to the Dark
Wild nights! Wild nights!
Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830 – 1894)
Goblin Market
Remember
Song
The First Day
Lewis Carroll (1832 – 1898)
The Walrus and the Carpenter
Thomas Hardy (1840 – 1928)
Channel firing
I look into my glass
The oxen
The Giant Book of Poetry (2006) Page 76