Near as I reach thereto!
What a good haunter I am, O tell him!
Quickly make him know
If he but sigh since my loss befell him
Straight to his side I go.
Tell him a faithful one is doing
All that love can do
Still that his path may be worth pursuing,
And to bring peace thereto.
THOMAS HARDY
ENGLISH (1840-1928)
The Voice
Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
But as at first, when our day was fair.
Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,
Standing as when I drew near to the town
Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,
Even to the original air-blue gown!
Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness
Travelling across the wet mead to me here,
You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,
Heard no more again far or near?
Thus I; faltering forward,
Leaves around me falling,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,
And the woman calling.
THOMAS HARDY
ENGLISH (1840-1928)
His Immortality
I
I saw a dead man’s finer part
Shining within each faithful heart
Of those bereft. Then said I: “This must be
His immortality.”
II
I looked there as the seasons wore,
And still his soul continuously bore
A life in theirs. But less its shine excelled
Than when I first beheld.
III
His fellow-yearsmen passed, and then
In later hearts I looked for him again;
And found him—shrunk, alas! into a thin
And spectral mannikin.
IV
Lastly I ask—now old and chill —
If aught of him remain unperished still;
And find, in me alone, a feeble spark,
Dying amid the dark.
THOMAS HARDY
ENGLISH (1840-1928)
Little Boy Blue
The little toy dog is covered with dust,
But sturdy and stanch he stands;
And the little toy soldier is red with rust,
And his musket moulds in his hands.
Time was when the little toy dog was new,
And the soldier was passing fair;
And that was the time when our Little Boy Blue
Kissed them and put them there.
“Now, don’t you go till I come,” he said,
“And don’t you make any noise!”
So, toddling off to his trundle-bed,
He dreamt of the pretty toys;
And, as he was dreaming, an angel song
Awakened our Little Boy Blue —
Oh! the years are many, the years are long,
But the little toy friends are true!
Ay, faithful to Little Boy Blue they stand,
Each in the same old place,
Awaiting the touch of a little hand,
The smile of a little face;
And they wonder, as waiting the long years through
In the dust of that little chair,
What has become of our Little Boy Blue,
Since he kissed them and put them there.
EUGENE FIELD
AMERICAN (1850-1895)
To an Athlete Dying Young
The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.
To-day, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.
Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.
Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears:
Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.
So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.
And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl’s.
A. E. HOUSMAN
ENGLISH (1859-1936)
For a Dead Lady
No more with overflowing light
Shall fill the eyes that now are faded,
Nor shall another’s fringe with night
Their woman-hidden world as they did.
No more shall quiver down the days
The flowing wonder of her ways,
Whereof no language may requite
The shifting and the many-shaded.
The grace, divine, definitive,
Clings only as a faint forestalling;
The laugh that love could not forgive
Is hushed, and answers to no calling;
The forehead and the little ears
Have gone where Saturn keeps the years;
The breast where roses could not live
Has done with rising and with falling.
The beauty, shattered by the laws
That have creation in their keeping,
No longer trembles at applause,
Or over children that are sleeping;
And we who delve in beauty’s lore
Know all that we have known before
Of what inexorable cause
Makes Time so vicious in his reaping.
EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON
AMERICAN (1869-1935)
The House on the Hill
They are all gone away,
The House is shut and still,
There is nothing more to say.
Through broken walls and gray
The winds blow bleak and shrill:
They are all gone away.
Nor is there one to-day
To speak them good or ill:
There is nothing more to say.
Why is it then we stray
Around the sunken sill?
They are all gone away,
And our poor fancy-play
For them is wasted skill:
There is nothing more to say.
There is ruin and decay
In the House on the Hill:
They are all gone away,
There is nothing more to say.
EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON
AMERICAN (1869-1935)
The Widow’s Lament in Springtime
Sorrow is my own yard
where the new grass
flames as it has flamed
often before but not
with the cold fire
that closes round me this year.
Thirtyfive years
I lived with my husband.
The plumtree is white today
with masses of flowers.
Masses of flowers
load the cherry branches
yellow and some red
but the grief in my heart
is stronger than they
for though they were my joy
formerly, today I notice them
and turn away for
getting.
Today my son told me
that in the meadows,
at the edge of the heavy woods
in the distance, he saw
trees of white flowers.
I feel that I would like
to go there
and fall into those flowers
and sink into the marsh near them.
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
AMERICAN (1883-1963)
Shout No More
Stop killing the dead,
Shout no more, don’t shout
If you still want to hear them,
If you’re hoping not to perish.
Their murmur is imperceptible,
The sound they make no louder
Than growing grass,
Happy where men don’t pass.
GIUSEPPE UNGARETTI
ITALIAN (1888-1970)
TRANSLATED BY ANDREW FRISARDI
While I Slept
While I slept, while I slept and the night grew colder
She would come to my room, stepping softly
And draw a blanket about my shoulder
While I slept.
While I slept, while I slept in the dark, still heat
She would come to my bedside, stepping coolly
And smooth the twisted, troubled sheet
While I slept.
Now she sleeps, sleeps under quiet rain
While nights grow warm or nights grow colder.
And I wake, and sleep, and wake again
While she sleeps.
ROBERT FRANCIS
AMERICAN (1901-1987)
The Human Condition
IF POETRY IS (AMONG OTHER THINGS, BUT PERHAPS PRIMARILY) AN EXERCISE IN THE CLEAR DEFINITION OF FEELING, THEN THIS PART OF THE BOOK CAN BE TAKEN AS A partial lexicon of such definitions. Approaching analogous situations at different times and from different angles, individual poets open up altogether distinct perspectives. Immense nouns—passion, love, separation, solitude, sorrow, survival —stand like symbolic arches as emblems for our lives. By long overexposure—precisely like monuments that one passes every day on the street—the words that ought to carry the weightiest import come to be drained of any effect at all. The work of poets is to demonstrate that those nouns can, after all, possess specific and unavoidable meaning. That meaning is not to be confused with some kind of didactic message: what the poem nails, often by the simplest of means, is not essentially paraphrasable. It’s in the sounds and textures, in the proportions and the shape of the poem that meaning is embedded, and it’s by totally grasping what is going on at all the poet’s levels that the reader may discover an experience of unexampled richness in what might otherwise seem a bald statement. Indeed, the extravagant intimacy of poetry is perhaps best measured by those occasions when the poem seems to engage merely the most ordinary recurrences of existence. Indeed, it is precisely at those moments when the poet appears to be fine-tuning a perception of sheer humdrum blankness—like the speaker in Robert Frost’s “The Most of It,” who “thought he kept the universe alone”—that the inexplicable comes crashing through like the great buck in that poem who “stumbled through the rocks with horny tread, / And forced the underbrush—and that was all.” The poems of spiritual awakening with which this section concludes address the infinitely large through the immediate and transient, as when George Herbert, in his great poem “The Flower,” describes an inner restoration in the simplest terms: “I once more smell the dew and rain”; or when Walt Whitman finds the deepest possible image of his own soul’s quest in a spider spinning its web: “It launched forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself / Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.”
FRIENDSHIP
To an Old Comrade in the Army of Brutus
Dear friend who fought so often, together with me,
In the ranks of Brutus in hardship and in danger,
Under whose sponsorship have you come back,
A citizen again, beneath our sky?
Pompey, we drank together so many times,
And we were together in the Philippi fight,
The day I ran away, leaving my shield,
And Mercury got me out of it, carrying me
In a cloud, in a panic, right through the enemy rage;
But the undertow of a wave carried you back
Into the boiling waters of the war.
Come, stretch your weary legs out under this tree;
Let’s dedicate a feast to Jupiter
Just as we told each other we’d do someday.
I’ve got good food to eat, good wine to drink;
Come celebrate old friendship under the laurel.
HORACE
LATIN (65-8 B.C.)
TRANSLATED BY DAVID FERRY
Inviting a Friend to Supper
Tonight, grave sir, both my poor house and I
Do equally desire your company:
Not that we think us worthy such a guest,
But that your worth will dignify our feast
With those that come; whose grace may make that seem
Something, which else could hope for no esteem.
It is the fair acceptance, sir, creates
The entertainment perfect: not the cates.
Yet shall you have, to rectify your palate,
An olive, capers, or some better salad
Ushering the mutton; with a short-legged hen,
If we can get her, full of eggs, and then
Lemons, and wine for sauce; to these, a cony
Is not to be despaired of for our money;
And though fowl now be scarce, yet there are clerks,
The sky not falling, think we may have larks.
I’ll tell you of more, and lie, so you will come:
May yet be there; and godwit, if we can;
Knat, rail and ruff too. Howsoe’er, my man
Shall read a piece of Virgil, Tacitus,
Livy, or of some better book to us,
Of which we’ll speak our minds, amidst our meat;
And I’ll profess no verses to repeat:
To this, if aught appear which I not know of,
That will the pastry, not my paper show of.
Digestive cheese and fruit there sure will be;
But that which most doth take my Muse and me
Is a pure cup of rich canary wine,
Which is the Mermaid’s now, but shall be mine;
Of which had Horace or Anacreon tasted,
Their lives, as do their lines, till now had lasted.
Tobacco, nectar, or the Thespian spring
Are all but Luther’s beer, to this I sing.
Of this we will sup free, but moderately,
And we will have no Pooly or Parrot by;
Nor shall our cups make any guilty men,
But at our parting we will be as when
We innocently met. No simple word
That shall be uttered at our mirthful board
Shall make us sad next morning, or affright
The liberty that we’ll enjoy tonight.
BEN JONSON
ENGLISH (1572-1637)
Travelling
This is the spot:—how mildly does the sun
Shine in between the fading leaves! the air
In the habitual silence of this wood
Is more than silent; and this bed of heath —
Where shall we find so sweet a resting-place?
Come, let me see thee sink into a dream
Of quiet thoughts, protracted till thine eye
Be calm as water when the winds are gone
And no one can tell whither. My sweet Friend,
We two have had such happy hours together
That my heart melts in me to think of it.
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
ENGLISH (1770-1850)
This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison
addressed to charles lamb, of the india
house, london
In the June of 1797 some long-expected friends paid a visit to the author’s cottage; and on the morning of their arrival, he met with an accident, which disabled him from walking during the whole time of their stay. One evening, when they had left him for a few hours, he composed the following lines in the garden-bower.
Well, they are gone, and here must I remain,
This lime-tree bower my prison! I have lost
Beauties and feelings, such as would have been
Most sweet to my remembrance even when age
Had dimmed mine eyes to blindness! They, meanwhile,
Friends, whom I never more may meet again,
On springy heath, along the hill-top edge,
Wander in gladness, and wind down, perchance,
To that still roaring dell, of which I told;
The roaring dell, o’erwooded, narrow, deep,
And only speckled by the mid-day sun;
Where its slim trunk the ash from rock to rock
Flings arching like a bridge;—that branchless ash,
Unsunned and damp, whose few poor yellow leaves
Ne’er tremble in the gale, yet tremble still,
Fanned by the water-fall! and there my friends
Behind the dark green file of long lank weeds,
That all at once (a most fantastic sight!)
Still nod and drip beneath the dripping edge
Of the blue clay-stone.
Now, my friends emerge
Beneath the wide wide Heaven—and view again
The many-steepled tract magnificent
Of hilly fields and meadows, and the sea,
With some fair bark, perhaps, whose sails light up
The slip of smooth clear blue betwixt two Isles
Of purple shadow! Yes! they wander on
In gladness all; but thou, methinks, most glad,
My gentle-hearted Charles! for thou hast pined
And hungered after Nature, many a year,
In the great City pent, winning thy way
With sad yet patient soul, through evil and pain
And strange calamity! Ah! slowly sink
Behind the western ridge, thou glorious Sun!
Shine in the slant beams of the sinking orb,
Ye purple heath-flowers! richlier burn, ye clouds!
Live in the yellow light, ye distant groves!
And kindle, thou blue Ocean! So my friend
Struck with deep joy, may stand, as I have stood,
Silent with swimming sense; yea, gazing round
On the wide landscape, gaze till all doth seem