Favorite Poems (titles and poets are given at the end) About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters: how well they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must be Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating On a pond at the edge of a wood: They never forgot That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree. In Brueghels "Icarus," for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on. *********************************************** Algernon, The doctor's son, Was playing with a loaded gun. He pointed it towards his sister, Aimed very carefully, but Missed her. The doctor, who was standing near, The loud explosion chanced to hear, And reprimanded Algernon For playing with a loaded gun. ************************************************ As evening fell the day's oppression lifted; Far peaks came into focus; it had rained: Across wide lawns and cultured flowers drifted The conversation of the highly trained. Two gardeners watched them pass and priced their shoes; A chauffeur waited, reading in the drive, For them to finish their exchange of views; It seemed a picture of the private life. Far off, no matter what good they intended, The armies waited for a verbal error With all the instruments for causing pain: And on the issue of their charm depended A land laid waste, with all its young men slain, Its women weeping, and its towns in terror. ********************************* At the next vacancy for God, if I am elected, I shall forgive last the delicately wounded who, having been slugged no harder than anyone else, never got up again, neither to fight back, nor to finger their jaws in painful admiration. They who are wholly broken, and they in whom mercy is understanding, I shall embrace at once and lead to pillows in heaven. But they who are the meek by trade, baiting the best of their betters with the extortions of a mock-helplessness I shall take last to love, and never wholly. Let them all into Heaven---I abolish Hell--- but let it be read over them as they enter: "Beware the calculations of the meek, who gambled nothing, gave nothing, and could never receive enough." ************************************ Encased in talent like a uniform, The rank of every poet is well known; They can amaze us like a thunderstorm, Or die so young, or live for years alone. They can dash forward like hussars: but he Must struggle out of his boyish gift and learn How to be plain and awkward, how to be One after whom none think it worth to turn. For, to achieve his lightest wish, he must Become the whole of boredom, subject to Vulgar complaints like love, among the Just Be just, among the Filthy filthy too, And in his own weak person, if he can, Dully put up with all the wrongs of Man. ************************ From my mother's sleep I fell into the State And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze. Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life, I woke to to black flak and the nightmare fighters. When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose. *********************** Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths Enwrought with golden and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half-light, I would spread the cloths under your feet: But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams. ********************** I chose the bed downstairs by the sea-window for a good death-bed When we built the house; it is ready waiting, Unused unless by some guest in a twelvemonth, who hardly suspects Its latter purpose. I often regard it, With neither dislike nor desire; rather with both, so equalled That they kill each other and a crystalline interest Remains alone. We are safe to finish what we have to finish; And then it will sound rather like music When the patient daemon behind the screen of sea-rock and sky Thumps with his staff, and calls thrice: "Come, Jeffers." **************************************** I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed: And on the pedestal these words appear: "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away. ********************************* No, not for him the darkly planned Ambiguities of flesh. His maker gave him one command: Mesh. ********************************** Nor dread nor hope attend A dying animal; A man awaits his end Dreading and hoping all; Many times he died, Many times rose again. A great man in his pride Confronting murderous men Casts derision upon Supercession of breath; He knows death to the bone--- Man has created death. ********************* Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land, Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome, her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin-cities frame. "Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she, With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" ************************************ Others abide our question. Thou art free, We ask and ask: Thou smilest and art still, Out-topping knowledge. For the loftiest hill That to the stars uncrowns his majesty, Planting his steadfast footsteps in the sea, Making the heaven of heavens his dwelling-place, Spares but the cloudy border of his base To the foil'd searching of mortality; And thou, who didst the stars and sunbeams know, Self-school'd, self-scann'd, self-honour'd, self-secure, Didst walk on earth unguess'd at. Better so! All pains the immortal spirit must endure, All weakness that impairs, all griefs that bow, Find their sole voice in that victorious brow. ************************************** Our king is swift to receive the blood of innocents; angels in concert chime their praise. But for the blood that was spilled the clouds are grieving. In a grave dream the tyrant was choked for his malice. But for the blood that was spilled the clouds are grieving. Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit. But for the blood that was spilled the clouds are grieving. *************************************************** These, in the day when heaven was falling, The hour when earth's foundations fled, Followed their mercenary calling And took their wages and are dead. Their shoulders held the sky suspended; They stood, and earth's foundations stay; What God abandoned, these defended, And saved the sum of things for pay. ********************************** Toil and grow rich, What's that but to lie With a foul witch And after, drained dry, To be brought To the chamber where Lies one long sought With despair? ************************************* "What is the world, O soldiers? It is I. I, this incessant snow, This northern sky; Soldiers, this solitude Through which we go Is I." ************************************** When we are old and these rejoicing veins Are frosty channels to a muted stream, And out of all our burning there remains No feeblest spark to fire us, even in dream, This be our solace: that it was not said When we were young and warm and in our prime, Upon our couch we lay as lie the dead, Sleeping away the unreturning time. O sweet, O heavy-lidded, O my love, When morning strikes her spear upon the land, And we must rise and arm us and reprove The insolent daylight with a steady hand, Be not discountenanced if the knowing know We rose from rapture but an hour ago. **************************************** The titles (in alphabetical order): The Bed by the Window The Cog Death The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner Embassy Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries In Place of a Curse Musee des Beaux Arts Napoleon The New Colossus The Novelist Ozymandias Shakespeare The Witch (N.B. Some poems are untitled.) ************************************ The poets (in alphabetical order): Matthew Arnold W. H. Auden Hilaire Belloc John Ciardi Walter De La Mare A. E. Housman Hildegard of Bingen Randall Jarrell Robinson Jeffers Emma Lazarus Edna St. Vincent Millay Percy Bysshe Shelley John Updike W. B. Yeats (N.B. There are more poems than poets.)