if you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
or, being hated, don’t give way to hating,
and yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;
if you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
if you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
if you can meet with triumph and disaster
and treat those two imposters just the same;
if you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
and stoop and build ’em up with wornout tools;
if you can make one heap of all your winnings
and risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
and lose, and start again at your beginnings
and never breath a word about your loss;
if you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
to serve your turn long after they are gone,
and so hold on when there is nothing in you
except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”;
if you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
or walk with kings—nor lose the common touch;
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
if all men count with you, but none too much;
if you can fill the unforgiving minute
with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run—
yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
and—which is more—you’ll be a Man my son!
The Way Through the Woods1
They shut the road through the woods
seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again,
and now you would never know
there was once a road through the woods
before they planted the trees.
It is underneath the coppice and heath
and the thin anemones.
Only the keeper sees
that, where the ring-dove broods,
and the badgers roll at ease,
there was once a road through the woods.
Yet if you enter the woods
of a summer evening late,
when the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools
where the otter whistles his mate,
(they fear not men in the woods,
because they see so few.)
You will hear the beat of a horse’s feet,
and the swish of a skirt in the dew,
steadily cantering through
the misty solitudes,
as though they perfectly knew
the old lost road through the woods…
but there is no road through the woods.
We and They1
Father and Mother, and Me,
Sister and Auntie say
all the people like us are We,
and every one else is They.
And They live over the sea,
while We live over the way,
but-would you believe it?—They look upon We
as only a sort of They!
We eat pork and beef
with cow-horn-handled knives.
They who gobble Their rice off a leaf,
are horrified out of Their lives;
while they who live up a tree,
and feast on grubs and clay,
(isn’t it scandalous? ) look upon We
as a simply disgusting They!
We shoot birds with a gun.
They stick lions with spears.
Their full-dress is un-.
We dress up to Our ears.
They like Their friends for tea.
We like Our friends to stay;
and, after all that, They look upon We
as an utterly ignorant They!
We eat kitcheny food.
We have doors that latch.
They drink milk or blood,
under an open thatch.
We have Doctors to fee.
They have Wizards to pay.
And (impudent heathen!) They look upon We
as a quite impossible They!
All good people agree,
and all good people say,
all nice people, like Us, are We
and every one else is They:
but if you cross over the sea,
instead of over the way,
you may end by (think of it!) looking on We
as only a sort of They!
William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939)
A Dream of Death1
I dreamed that one had died in a strange place
near no accustomed hand,
and they had nailed the boards above her face,
the peasants of that land,
wondering to lay her in that solitude,
and raised above her mound
a cross they had made out of two bits of wood,
and planted cypress round;
and left her to the indifferent stars above
until I carved these words:
she was more beautiful than thy first love,
but now lies under boards.
Politics2
‘In our time the destiny of man presents its meanings in political terms.’ Thomas Mann
How can I, that girl standing there,
my attention fix
on Roman or on Russian
or on Spanish politics?
Yet here’s a traveled man that knows
what he talks about,
and there’s a politician
that has both read and thought,
and maybe what they say is true
of war and war’s alarms,
but O that I were young again
and held her in my arms.
The Ballad of Father Gilligan1
The old priest Peter Gilligan
was weary night and day;
for half his flock were in their beds,
or under green sods lay.
Once, while he nodded on a chair,
at the moth-hour of eve,
another poor man sent for him,
and he began to grieve.
‘I have no rest, nor joy, nor peace,
for people die and die’;
and after cried he, ’God forgive!
my body spake, not I!’
He knelt, and leaning on the chair
he prayed and fell asleep;
and the moth-hour went from the fields,
and stars began to peep.
They slowly into millions grew,
and leaves shook in the wind;
and God covered the world with shade,
and whispered to mankind.
Upon the time of sparrow-chirp
when the moths came once more.
The old priest Peter Gilligan
stood upright on the floor.
‘Mavrone, mavrone! the man has died
while I slept on the chair’;
he roused his horse out of its sleep,
and rode with little care.
He rode now as he never rode,
by rocky lane and fen;
the sick man’s wife opened the door:
‘Father! you come again!’
‘And is the poor man dead?’ he cried.
‘He died an hour ago.’
The old priest Peter Gilligan
in grief swayed to and fro.
‘When you were gone, he turned and died
as merry as a bird.’
The old priest Peter Gilligan
he knelt him at that word.
‘He Who hath made the night of stars
for souls who tire and bleed,
sent one of His great angels down
to help me in my need.
‘He Who is wrapped in purple robes,
with planets in His care,
had pity on the least of things
asleep upon a chair.’
The Indian upon God1
I passed along the water’s edge below the humid trees,
my spirit rocked in evening light,
the rushes round my knees,
my spirit rocked in sleep and sighs;
and saw the moor-fowl pace
all dripping on a grassy slope,
and saw them cease to chase
each other round in circles, and heard the eldest speak:
who holds the world between His bill
and made us strong or weak
is an undying moorfowl, and He lives beyond the sky.
The rains are from His dripping wing,
the moonbeams from His eye.
I passed a little further on and heard a lotus talk:
who made the world and ruleth it,
He hangeth on a stalk,
for I am in His image made, and all this tinkling tide
is but a sliding drop of rain between His petals wide.
A little way within the gloom a roebuck raised his eyes
brimful of starlight, and he said:
The Stamper of the Skies,
he is a gentle roebuck; for how else, I pray, could He
conceive a thing so sad and soft, a gentle thing like me?
I passed a little further on and heard a peacock say:
who made the grass and made the worms
and made my feathers gay,
he is a monstrous peacock, and He waveth all the night
his languid tail above us, lit with myriad spots of light.
The Sad Shepherd2
There was a man whom Sorrow named his Friend,
and he, of his high comrade Sorrow dreaming,
went walking with slow steps along the gleaming
and humming Sands, where windy surges wend:
and he called loudly to the stars to bend
from their pale thrones and comfort him, but they
among themselves laugh on and sing alway:
and then the man whom Sorrow named his friend
cried out, Dim sea, hear my most piteous story!
The sea Swept on and cried her old cry still,
rolling along in dreams from hill to hill.
He fled the persecution of her glory
and, in a far-off, gentle valley stopping,
cried all his story to the dewdrops glistening.
But naught they heard, for they are always listening,
the dewdrops, for the sound of their own dropping.
And then the man whom Sorrow named his friend
sought once again the shore, and found a shell,
and thought, I will my heavy story tell
till my own words, re-echoing, shall send
their sadness through a hollow, pearly heart;
and my own tale again for me shall sing,
and my own whispering words be comforting,
and lo! my ancient burden may depart.
Then he sang softly nigh the pearly rim;
but the sad dweller by the sea-ways lone
changed all he sang to inarticulate moan
among her wildering whirls, forgetting him.
Shiki (Masaoka Tseunenori) (1867 – 1902)
By that fallen house1
Translated from the Japanese by Peter Beilenson
By that fallen house
the pear-tree stands full-blooming …
an ancient battle-site
Edgar Lee Masters (1868 – 1950)
Alexander Throckmorton1
In youth my wings were strong and tireless,
but I did not know the mountains.
In age I knew the mountains
but my weary wings could not follow my vision—
genius is wisdom and youth.
Aner Clute2
Over and over they used to ask me,
while buying the wine or the beer,
in Peoria first, and later in Chicago,
Denver, Frisco, New York, wherever I lived,
how I happened to lead the life,
and what was the start of it.
Well, I told them a silk dress,
and a promise of marriage from a rich man—
(it was Lucius Atherton).
But that was not really it at all.
Suppose a boy steals an apple
from the tray at the grocery store,
and they all begin to call him a thief,
the editor, minister, judge, and all the people—
“A thief,” “a thief,” “a thief,” wherever he goes.
And he can’t get work, and he can’t get bread
without stealing it, why, the boy will steal.
It’s the way the people regard the theft of the apple
that makes the boy what he is.
Conrad Siever3
Not in that wasted garden
where bodies are drawn into grass
that feeds no flocks, and into evergreens
that bear no fruit—
there where along the shaded walks
vain sighs are heard,
and vainer dreams are dreamed
of close communion with departed souls—
but here under the apple tree
I loved and watched and pruned
with gnarled hands
in the long, long years;
here under the roots of this northern-spy
to move in the chemic change and circle of life,
into the soil and into the flesh of the tree,
and into the living epitaphs
of redder apples!
Fiddler Jones1
The earth keeps some vibration going
there in your heart, and that is you.
And if the people find you can fiddle,
why, fiddle you must, for all your life.
What do you see, a harvest of clover?
Or a meadow to walk through to the river?
The wind’s in the corn; you rub your hands
for beeves hereafter ready for market;
or else you hear the rustle of skirts
like the girls when dancing at Little Grove.
To Cooney Potter a pillar of dust
or whirling leaves meant ruinous drouth;
they looked to me like Red-Head Sammy
stepping it off, to “Toor-a-Loor.”
How could I till my forty acres
not to speak of getting more,
with a medley of horns, bassoons and piccolos
stirred in my brain by crows and robins
and the creak of a wind-mill—only these?
And I never started to plow in my life
that some one did not stop in the road
and take me away to a dance or picnic.
I ended up with forty acres;
I ended up with a broken fiddle—
and a broken laugh, and a thousand memories,
and not a single regret.
Silas Dement2
It was moon-light, and the earth sparkled
with new-fallen frost.
It was midnight and not a soul abroad.
Out of the chimney of the court-house
a gray-hound of smoke leapt and chased
the northwest wind.
I carried a ladder to the landing of the stairs
and leaned it against the frame of the trap-door
in the ceiling of the portico,
and I crawled under the roof amid the rafters
and flung among the seasoned timbers
a lighted handful of oil-soaked waste.
Then I came down and slunk away.
In a little while the fire-bell rang—
Clang! Clang! Clang!
And the Spoon River ladder company
came with a dozen buckets and began to pour water
on the glorious bon-fire, growing hotter,
higher and brighter, till the walls fell in,
and the limestone colu
mns where Lincoln stood
crashed like trees when the woodman fells them…
when I came back from Joliet
there was a new court house with a dome.
For I was punished like all who destroy
the past for the sake of the future.
Tom Beatty1
I was a lawyer like Harmon Whitney
or Kinsey Keene or Garrison Standard,
for I tried the rights of property,
although by lamp-light, for thirty years,
in that poker room in the opera house.
And I say to you that Life’s a gambler
head and shoulders above us all.
No mayor alive can close the house.
And if you lose, you can squeal as you will;
you’ll not get back your money.
He makes the percentage hard to conquer;
he stacks the cards to catch your weakness
and not to meet your strength.
And he gives you seventy years to play:
for if you cannot win in seventy
you cannot win at all.
So, if you lose, get out of the room—
get out of the room when your time is up.
It’s mean to sit and fumble the cards,
and curse your losses, leaden-eyed,
whining to try and try.
Roka (1868 – 1927)
Winter rain deepens2
Translated from the Japanese by Peter Beilenson
Winter rain deepens
lichened letters on the grave …
and my old sadness
Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869 – 1935)
Amaryllis1
Once, when I wandered in the woods alone,
an old man tottered up to me and said,
“Come, friend, and see the grave that I have made
for Amaryllis.” There was in the tone
of his complaint such quaver and such moan
that I took pity on him and obeyed,
and long stood looking where his hands had laid
an ancient woman, shrunk to skin and bone.
Far out beyond the forest I could hear
the calling of loud progress, and the bold
incessant scream of commerce ringing clear;
but though the trumpets of the world were glad,
it made me lonely and it made me sad
The Giant Book of Poetry Page 23