The Giant Book of Poetry

by William H. Roetzheim, Editor

  in your pockets.

  Go now

  I think you are ready.

  Sara Teasdale (1884 – 1933)

  There will come soft rains1

  There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,

  and swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

  and frogs in the pools singing at night,

  and wild plum trees in tremulous white;

  robins will wear their feathery fire,

  whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

  and not one will know of the war, not one

  will care at last when it is done.

  Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,

  if mankind perished utterly;

  and Spring herself, when she woke at dawn

  would scarcely know that we were gone.

  D.H. Lawrence (1885 – 1930)

  From The Ship of Death1

  I

  Now it is autumn and the falling fruit

  and the long journey towards oblivion.

  The apples falling like great drops of dew

  to bruise themselves an exit from themselves.

  And it is time to go, to bid farewell

  to one’s own self, and find an exit

  from the fallen self.

  New Year’s Eve2

  There are only two things now,

  the great black night scooped out

  and this fire-glow.

  This fire-glow, the core,

  and we the two ripe pips

  that are held in store.

  Listen, the darkness rings

  as it circulates round our fire.

  Take off your things.

  Your shoulders, your bruised throat!

  Your breasts, your nakedness!

  This fiery coat!

  As the darkness flickers and dips,

  as the firelight falls and leaps

  from your feet to your lips!

  Snake1

  A snake came to my water-trough

  on a hot, hot day, and I in pajamas for the heat,

  to drink there.

  In the deep, strange-scented shade

  of the great dark carob-tree

  I came down the steps with my pitcher

  and must wait,

  must stand and wait,

  for there he was at the trough before me.

  He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall

  in the gloom

  and trailed his yellow-brown slackness

  soft-bellied down,

  over the edge of the stone trough

  and rested his throat upon the stone bottom,

  and where the water had dripped from the tap,

  in a small clearness,

  he sipped with his straight mouth,

  softly drank through his straight gums,

  into his slack long body,

  silently.

  Someone was before me at my water-trough,

  and I, like a second comer, waiting.

  He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,

  and looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,

  and flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips,

  and mused a moment,

  and stooped and drank a little more,

  being earth-brown,

  earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth

  on the day of Sicilian July with Etna smoking.

  The voice of my education said to me

  he must be killed,

  for in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent,

  the gold are venomous.

  And voices in me said, If you were a man

  you would take a stick and break him now,

  and finish him off.

  But must I confess how I liked him,

  how glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet,

  to drink at my water-trough

  and depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,

  into the burning bowels of this earth?

  Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him?

  Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him?

  Was it humility, to feel so honored?

  I felt so honored.

  And yet those voices:

  if you were not afraid, you would kill him!

  And truly I was afraid,

  I was most afraid, But even so, honored still more

  that he should seek my hospitality

  from out the dark door of the secret earth.

  He drank enough

  and lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,

  and flickered his tongue

  like a forked night on the air, so black,

  seeming to lick his lips,

  and looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air,

  and slowly turned his head,

  and slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream,

  proceeded to draw his slow length curving round

  and climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.

  And as he put his head into that dreadful hole,

  and as he slowly drew up,

  snake-easing his shoulders, and entered farther,

  a sort of horror,

  a sort of protest against his withdrawing

  into that horrid black hole,

  deliberately going into the blackness,

  and slowly drawing himself after,

  overcame me now his back was turned.

  I looked round, I put down my pitcher,

  I picked up a clumsy log

  and threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.

  I think it did not hit him,

  but suddenly that part of him that was left behind

  convulsed in undignified haste.

  Writhed like lightning, and was gone

  into the black hole,

  the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front,

  at which, in the intense still noon,

  I stared with fascination.

  And immediately I regretted it.

  I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!

  I despised myself

  and the voices of my accursed human education.

  And I thought of the albatross

  and I wished he would come back, my snake.

  For he seemed to me again like a king,

  like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,

  now due to be crowned again.

  And so, I missed my chance

  with one of the lords of life.

  And I have something to expiate:

  a pettiness.

  Ezra Pound (1885 – 1972)

  A Pact1

  I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman—

  I have detested you long enough.

  I come to you as a grown child

  who has had a pig-headed father;

  I am old enough now to make friends.

  It was you that broke the new wood

  now is a time for carving.

  We have one sap and one root—

  let there be commerce between us.

  Francesca2

  You came in out of the night

  and there were flowers in your hands,

  now you will come out of a confusion of people,

  out of a turmoil of speech about you.

  I who have seen you amid the primal things

  was angry when they spoke your name

  in ordinary places.

  I would that the cool waves might flow over my mind,

  and that the world should dry as a dead leaf,

  or as a dandelion seed-pod and be swept away,

  so that I might find you again,

  alone.

  In a Station of the Metro3

  The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

  petals on a wet, black bough.

  Lustra (from the Introduction)1

  And the days are not full enough

  and the nights are not full enough />
  and life slips by like a field mouse

  Not shaking the grass.

  Tame Cat2

  It rests me to be among beautiful women

  why should one always lie about such matters?

  I repeat:

  it rests me to converse with beautiful women

  even though we talk nothing but nonsense,

  the purring of the invisible antennae

  is both stimulating and delightful.

  Salutation1

  O generation of the thoroughly smug

  and thoroughly uncomfortable,

  I have seen fishermen picnicking in the sun,

  I have seen them with untidy families,

  I have seen their smiles full of teeth

  and heard ungainly laughter.

  And I am happier than you are,

  and they were happier than I am;

  and the fish swim in the lake

  and do not even own clothing.

  The Eyes2

  Rest Master, for we be a-weary weary

  and would feel the fingers of the wind

  upon these lids that lie over us

  sodden and lead-heavy.

  Rest brother, for lo! the dawn is without!

  The yellow flame paleth

  and the wax runs low.

  Free us, for without be goodly colors,

  green of the wood-moss and flower colors,

  and coolness beneath the trees.

  Free us, for we perish

  in this ever-flowing monotony

  of ugly print marks, black

  upon white parchment.

  Free us, for there is one

  whose smile more availeth

  than all the age-old knowledge of thy books:

  and we would look thereon.

  The Garden1

  Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall

  she walks by the railing of a path

  in Kensington Gardens,

  and she is dying piece-meal

  of a sort of emotional anemia.

  And round about there is a rabble

  of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor.

  They shall inherit the earth.

  In her is the end of breeding.

  Her boredom is exquisite and excessive.

  She would like some one to speak to her,

  and is almost afraid that I

  will commit that indiscretion.

  The Plunge2

  I would bathe myself in strangeness:

  these comforts heaped upon me, smother me!

  I burn, I scald so for the new,

  new friends, new faces,

  places!

  Oh to be out of this,

  this that is all I wanted

  —save the new.

  And you,

  love, you the much, the more desired!

  do I not loathe all walls, streets, stones,

  all mire, mist, all fog,

  all ways of traffic?

  You, I would have flow over me like water,

  oh, but far out of this!

  Grass, and low fields, and hills,

  and sun,

  oh, sun enough!

  Out, and alone, among some

  alien people!

  The Tree1

  I stood still and was a tree amid the wood,

  knowing the truth of things unseen before;

  of Daphne and the laurel bow

  and that god-feasting couple old

  that grew elm-oak amid the wold.

  ’Twas not until the gods had been

  kindly entreated, and been brought within

  unto the hearth of their heart’s home

  that they might do this wonder thing;

  nathless I have been a tree amid the wood

  and many a new thing understood

  that was rank folly to my head before.

  Louis Untermeyer (1885 – 1972)

  Long Feud2

  Where, without bloodshed, can there be

  a more relentless enmity

  than the long feud fought silently

  between man and the growing grass.

  Man’s the aggressor, for he has

  weapons to humble and harass

  the impudent spears that charge upon

  his sacred privacy of lawn.

  He mows them down, and they are gone

  only to lie in wait, although

  he builds above and digs below

  where never a root would dare to go.

  His are the triumphs till the day

  there’s no more grass to cut away

  and, weary of labor, weary of play,

  having exhausted every whim,

  he stretches out each conquering limb.

  And then the small grass covers him.

  Rupert Brooke (1887 – 1915)

  The Soldier1

  If I should die, think only this of me:

  that there’s some corner of a foreign field

  that is for ever England. There shall be

  in that rich earth a richer dust concealed;

  a dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,

  gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,

  a body of England’s, breathing English air,

  washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

  And think, this heart, all evil shed away,

  a pulse in the eternal mind, no less

  gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;

  her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;

  and laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,

  in hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

  Robinson Jeffers (1887 – 1962)

  Fawn’s Foster-Mother1

  The old woman sits on a bench before the door

  and quarrels with her meager pale demoralized daughter. Once when I

  passed I found her alone,

  laughing in the sun and saying that when she was first married she lived

  in the old farmhouse up Garapatas Canyon. (It is empty now, the roof

  has fallen but the log walls hang on the stone foundation; the redwoods

  have all been cut down, the oaks are standing; the place is now more

  solitary than ever before.) “When I was nursing my second baby my

  husband found a day-old fawn hid in a fern-brake and brought it; I put its

  mouth to the breast rather than let it starve, I had milk enough for three

  babies. Hey how it sucked, the little nuzzler,

  digging its little hoofs like quills into my stomach.

  I had more joy from that than from the others.”

  Her face is deformed with age, furrowed like a bad road

  with market-wagons, mean cares and decay.

  She is thrown up to the surface of things, a cell of dry skin soon to be

  shed from the earth’s old eye-brows,

  I see that once in her spring she lived in the streaming arteries, the stir of

  the world, the music of the mountain.

  Joyce Kilmer (1887 – 1918)

  Trees2

  I think that I shall never see

  a poem as lovely as a tree.

  A tree whose hungry mouth is prest

  against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;

  a tree that looks to God all day,

  and lifts her leafy arms to pray;

  a tree that may in summer wear

  a nest of robins in her hair;

  upon whose bosom snow has lain;

  who intimately lives with rain.

  Poems are made by fools like me,

  but only God can make a tree.

  Marianne Moore (1887 – 1972)

  I May, I Might, I Must1

  If you will tell me why the fen

  appears impassable, I then

  will tell you why I think that I

  can get across it if I try.

  Injudicious Gardening2
<
br />   If yellow betokens infidelity,

  I am an infidel.

  I could not bear a yellow rose ill will

  because books said that yellow boded ill,

  white promised well.

  However, your particular possession,

  the sense of privacy,

  indeed might deprecate

  offended ears, and need not tolerate

  effrontery.

  Poetry3

  I, too, dislike it.

  Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it,

  one discovers in it,

  after all,

  a place for the genuine.

  To a Steam Roller1

  The illustration

  is nothing to you without the application.

  You lack half wit. You crush all the particles down

  into close conformity,

  and then walk back and forth on them.

  Sparkling chips of rock

  are crushed down to the level of the parent block.

  Were not ’impersonal judgment in aesthetic

  matters, a metaphysical impossibility,’ you

  might fairly achieve

  it. As for butterflies, I can hardly conceive

  of one’s attending upon you, but to question

  the congruence of the complement is vain, if it exists.

  T.S. Eliot (1888 – 1965)

  Rhapsody on a Windy Night2

  Twelve o’clock.

  Along the reaches of the street

  held in a lunar synthesis,

  whispering lunar incantations

  dissolve the floors of memory

  and all its clear relations,

  its divisions and precisions,

  every street lamp that I pass

  beats like a fatalistic drum,

  and through the spaces of the dark

  midnight shakes the memory

  as a madman shakes a dead geranium.