The Art of Poetry

The Art of Poetry,

by Jorge Luis Borges

To gaze at a river made of time and water
And remember Time is another river.
To know we stray like a river and our faces vanish like water.

To feel that waking is another dream that
dreams of not dreaming and that the death
we fear in our bones is the death that every night we call a dream.

To see in every day and year a symbol of
all the days of man and his years, and
convert the outrage of the years into a music, a sound, and a symbol.
To see in death a dream, in the sunset a golden sadness--
such is poetry, humble and immortal, poetry,
returning, like dawn and the sunset.
Sometimes at evening there's a face
that sees us from the deeps of a mirror.
Art must be that sort of mirror, disclosing to each of us his face.
They say Ulysses, wearied of wonders,
wept with love on seeing Ithaca, humble and green.
Art is that Ithaca, a green eternity, not wonders.
Art is endless like a river flowing, passing,
yet remaining, a mirror
to the same inconstant Heraclitus, who is the same.

The Old Maid

"The Old Maid"

by Sara Teasdale

I saw her in a Broadway car,
The woman I might grow to be; I
felt my lover look at her
And then turn suddenly to me.
Her hair was dull and drew no light,
And yet its color was as mine;
Her eyes were strangely like my eyes,
Tho' love had never made them shine.
Her body was a thing grown thin,
Hungry for love that never came;
Her soul was frozen in the dark,
Unwarmed forever by love's flame.
I felt my lover look at her
And then turn suddenly to me –
His eyes were magic to defy
The woman I shall never be.

Song: Yes, Mary Ann, I Freely Grant

By Amelia Opie


Yes, Mary Ann, I freely grant,
The charms of Henry's eyes I see;
But while I gaze, I something want,
I want those eyes -- to gaze on me.
And I allow, in Henry's heart
Not Envy's self a fault can see:
Yet still I must one wish impart,
I wish that heart -- to sigh for me

Ipomoea

Ipomoea

By Louise Gluck


What was my crime in another life,
as in this life my crime
is sorrow, that I am not to be
permitted to ascend ever again,
never in any sense
permitted to repeat my life,
wound in the hawthorn, all
earthly beauty my punishment
as it is yours------
Source of my suffering, why
have you drawn from me
these flowers like the sky, except
to mark me as a part
of my master; I am
his cloak's color , my flesh giveth
form to his glory.

To The Man-of-War-Bird

by Walt Whitman

THOU who hast slept all night upon the storm,
Waking renew'd on thy prodigious pinions,
(Burst the wild storm? above it thou ascended'st,
And rested on the sky, thy slave that cradled thee,)
Now a blue point, far, far in heaven floating,
As to the light emerging here on deck I watch thee,
(Myself a speck, a point on the world's floating vast.)
Far, far at sea,
After the night's fierce drifts have strewn the shores with wrecks,
With re-appearing day as now so happy and serene, 10 The rosy and elastic dawn, the flashing sun,
The limpid spread of air cerulean,
Thou also re-appearest.
Thou born to match the gale, (thou art all wings,)
To cope with heaven and earth and sea and hurricane,
Thou ship of air that never furl'st thy sails,
Days, even weeks untired and onward, through spaces, realms gyrating,
At dusk that look'st on Senegal, at morn America,
That sport'st amid the lightning-flash and thunder-cloud,
In them, in thy experience, had'st thou my soul, 20
What joys! what joys were thine!

Have you been in Love?

Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like 'maybe we should be just friends' turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love". ~ Neil Gaiman

A Ballad Of The Trees And The Master

by Sidney Lanier

Into the woods my Master went,
Clean forspent, forspent. Into the woods my
Master came, Forspent with love and shame.
But the olives they were not blind to Him,
The little gray leaves were kind to Him:
The thorn-tree had a mind to Him
When into the woods He came.
Out of the woods my Master went,
And He was well content.
Out of the woods my Master came,
Content with death and shame.
When Death and Shame would woo Him last,
From under the trees they drew Him last:
'Twas on a tree they slew Him -- last
When out of the woods He came.

From The 'Antigone'

by William Butler Yeats

Overcome -- O bitter sweetness,
Inhabitant of the soft cheek of a girl --
The rich man and his affairs,
The fat flocks and the fields' fatness,
Mariners, rough harvesters;
Overcome Gods upon Parnassus;
Overcome the Empyrean;
hurl Heaven and Earth out of their places,
That in the Same calamity
Brother and brother, friend and friend,
Family and family, City and city may contend,
By that great glory driven wild.
Pray I will and sing I must, And yet I weep --
Oedipus' child Descends into the loveless dust.

Beginners

by Walt Whitman

HOW they are provided for upon the earth, (appearing at intervals;)
How dear and dreadful they are to the earth;
How they inure to themselves as much as to any--
What a paradox appears their age;
How people respond to them, yet know them not;
How there is something relentless in their fate, all times;
How all times mischoose the objects of their adulation and reward,
And how the same inexorable price must still be paid for the same great purchase.

Nothing Gold Can Stay

by Robert Lee Frost

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf. So
Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

I measure every grief I meet

by Emily Dickinson

I measure every grief I meet With analytic eyes;
I wonder if it weighs like mine,
Or has an easier size.
I wonder if they bore it long,
Or did it just begin?
I could not tell the date of mine,
It feels so old a pain.
I wonder if it hurts to live,
And if they have to try,
And whether, could they choose between,
They would not rather die.
I wonder if when years have piled--
Some thousands--on the cause
Of early hurt, if such a lapse
Could give them any pause;
Or would they go on aching still
Through centuries above,
Enlightened to a larger pain
By contrast with the love.
The grieved are many, I am told;
The reason deeper lies,--
Death is but one and comes but once
And only nails the eyes.
There's grief of want, and grief of cold,--
A sort they call 'despair,'
There's banishment from native eyes,
In sight of native air.
And though I may not guess the kind
Correctly yet to me
A piercing comfort it affords In passing Calvary,
To note the fashions of the cross
Of those that stand alone
Still fascinated to presume
That some are like my own.

On a Prospect of T'ai-shan

by Tu Fu

How is one to describe this king of mountains?
Throught the whole of Ch'i and Lu one never loses sight of its greenness.
In it the Creator has concentrated all that is numinous and beautiful.
Its northern and southern slopes divide the dawn from the dark.
The layered clouds begin at the climber's heaving chest,
and homing birds fly suddenly within range of his straining eyes.
One day I must stand on top of its highest peak and at a single glance see all the other mountains grown tiny beneath me.

The End of the Furrow

End of the Furrow,

by William Wilfred Campbell


When we come to the end of the furrow,
When our last day's work is done,
We will drink of the long red shaft of light
That slants from the westering sun.
We will turn from the field of our labour,
From the warm earth glad and brown,
And wend our feet up that village street,
And with our folk lie down.
Yea, after the long toil, surcease,
Rest to the hearts that roam,
When we join in the mystic silence of eve
The glad procession home.