Ne Rubeam, Pingui donatus Munere (Horace, Epistles II.i.267) While you, great patron of mankind, sustain The balanc'd world, and open all the main; Your country, chief, in arms abroad defend, At home, with morals, arts, and laws amend;
The wind rests its cheek upon the ground and feels the cool damp And lifts its head with twigs and small dead blades of grass Pressed into it as you might at the beach rise up and brush away The sand. The day is cool and says, “I’m just staying overnight.” The world is filled with music, and in between the music, silence And varying the silence all sorts of sounds, natural and man made: There goes a plane, some cars, geese that honk and, not here, but Not so far away, a scream so rending that to hear it is to be
Just over the horizon a great machine of death is roaring and rearing. We can hear it always. Earthquake, starvation, the ever-renewing sump of corpse-flesh. But in this valley the snow falls silently all day, and out our window We see the curtain of it shifting and folding, hiding us away in our little house, We see earth smoothened and beautified, made like a fantasy, the snow-clad trees So graceful. In our new bed, which is big enough to seem like the north pasture almost With our two cats, Cooker and Smudgins, lying undisturbed in the southeastern and southwestern corners, We lie loving and warm, looking out from time to time. “Snowbound,” we say. We speak of the poet
Let some one hold the book, and ask one of the questions. The answers being all numbered, the girl or boy who is questioned chooses a number, and the person who holds the book reads the answer to which that number belongs, aloud. For instance:
Question. What is your character? Answer. I choose No. 3
Questioner reads aloud:
No. 3. Gentle tempered, sweet and kind, To no angry word inclined.
I. I’m trying to spell out a state of amazement, A sweet dilation, the sway of spirit, That only finds room in your shape. They say that Transposed in our alphabet A Chinese sentence can turn into A series of one and the same conjunction.
I Fanny was younger once than she is now, And prettier of course: I do not mean To say that there are wrinkles on her brow; Yet, to be candid, she is past eighteen— Perhaps past twenty—but the girl is shy About her age, and Heaven forbid that I
II Should get myself in trouble by revealing A secret of this sort; I have too long Loved pretty women with a poet’s feeling, And when a boy, in day dream and in song, Have knelt me down and worshipp’d them: alas! They never thank’d me for’t—but let that pass.
Ranks of electroplated cubes, dwindling to glitters, Like the other pasture, the trigonometry of marble, Death’s candy-bed. Stone caked on stone, Dry pyramids and racks of iron balls. Life is observed, a precipitate of pellets, Or grammarians freeze it into spar, Their rhomboids, as for instance, the finest crystal Fixing a snowfall under glass. Gods are laid out
I have been enjoying the law and order of our community throughout the past three months since my wife and I, our two cats, and miscellaneous photographs of the six grandchildren belonging to our previous neighbors (with whom we were very close) arrived in Saratoga Springs which is clearly prospering under your custody
Rise, cleanly trust, divided star, And spend that delicate fraud upon the night— A lover’s instance moving mindful air To make its peace in dedicated light
Whose look is charnel. Lusters, intent and blind, Give darkness downward with a glow like sheaves— A gleaner’s pittance withered in the bind That keeps the summer godhead of the leaves
The end of the affair is always death. She’s my workshop. Slippery eye, out of the tribe of myself my breath finds you gone. I horrify those who stand by. I am fed. At night, alone, I marry the bed.
Finger to finger, now she’s mine. She’s not too far. She’s my encounter.
ou plutôt les chanter Recite your lines aloud, Ronsard advised, Or, even better, sing them. Common speech Held all the rhythmic measures that he prized In poetry. He had much more to teach,
I’d dislocated my life, so I went to the zoo. It was December but it wasn’t December. Pansies just planted were blooming in well-groomed beds. Lovers embraced under the sky’s Sunday blue. Children rode around and around on pastel trains. I read the labels stuck on every cage the way people at museums do, art being less interesting than information. Each fenced-in plot had a map,
For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry. For he is the servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him. For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way. For this is done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness. For then he leaps up to catch the musk, which is the blessing of God upon his prayer. For he rolls upon prank to work it in. For having done duty and received blessing he begins to consider himself. For this he performs in ten degrees.
I The clearest eyes in all the world they read With sense more keen and spirit of sight more true Than burns and thrills in sunrise, when the dew Flames, and absorbs the glory round it shed, As they the light of ages quick and dead, Closed now, forsake us: yet the shaft that slew Can slay not one of all the works we knew, Nor death discrown that many-laurelled head.
The works of words whose life seems lightning wrought, And moulded of unconquerable thought, And quickened with imperishable flame, Stand fast and shine and smile, assured that nought May fade of all their myriad-moulded fame,
I Oh Galuppi, Baldassaro, this is very sad to find! I can hardly misconceive you; it would prove me deaf and blind; But although I take your meaning, 'tis with such a heavy mind!
II Here you come with your old music, and here's all the good it brings. What, they lived once thus at Venice where the merchants were the kings, Where Saint Mark's is, where the Doges used to wed the sea with rings?
III Ay, because the sea's the street there; and 'tis arched by . . . what you call . . . Shylock's bridge with houses on it, where they kept the carnival: I was never out of England—it's as if I saw it all.
Comment form: