Poem of the Day

I was talking with my aunt about forgiveness at our breakfast yesterday and I thought of this poem. I find it incredibly moving.

Forgiveness
By John Greenleaf Whittier

My heart was heavy, for its trust had been
   Abused, its kindness answered with foul wrong;
So, turning gloomily from my fellow-men,
   One summer Sabbath day I strolled among
The green mounds of the village burial-place;
   Where, pondering how all human love and hate
   Find one sad level; and how, soon or late,
Wronged and wrongdoer, each with meekened face,
   And cold hands folded over a still heart,
Pass the green threshold of our common grave,
   Whither all footsteps tend, whence none depart,
Awed for myself, and pitying my race,
Our common sorrow, like a mighty wave,
Swept all my pride away, and trembling I forgave!

Let’s go with a short poem today.

Faith is a fine invention
By Emily Dickinson

“Faith” is a fine invention
When Gentlemen can see—
But Microscopes are prudent
In an Emergency.

Yesterday I was talking to Brianna about berry-picking.

Blackberrying
By Sylvia Plath

Nobody in the lane, and nothing, nothing but blackberries,
Blackberries on either side, though on the right mainly,
A blackberry alley, going down in hooks, and a sea
Somewhere at the end of it, heaving. Blackberries
Big as the ball of my thumb, and dumb as eyes
Ebon in the hedges, fat
With blue-red juices. These they squander on my fingers.
I had not asked for such a blood sisterhood; they must love me.
They accommodate themselves to my milkbottle, flattening their sides.

Overhead go the choughs in black, cacophonous flocks—
Bits of burnt paper wheeling in a blown sky.
Theirs is the only voice, protesting, protesting.
I do not think the sea will appear at all.
The high, green meadows are glowing, as if lit from within.
I come to one bush of berries so ripe it is a bush of flies,
Hanging their bluegreen bellies and their wing panes in a Chinese screen.
The honey-feast of the berries has stunned them; they believe in heaven.
One more hook, and the berries and bushes end.

The only thing to come now is the sea.
From between two hills a sudden wind funnels at me,
Slapping its phantom laundry in my face.
These hills are too green and sweet to have tasted salt.
I follow the sheep path between them. A last hook brings me
To the hills’ northern face, and the face is orange rock
That looks out on nothing, nothing but a great space
Of white and pewter lights, and a din like silversmiths
Beating and beating at an intractable metal.

Oops! I guess I missed posting one yesterday. I didn’t turn on my computer before I left for school and then spent a little too long at the bar celebrating a friend’s (successful) dissertation defense. Now I’m back on track.

Long time a child, and still a child, when years
By Hartley Coleridge

Long time a child, and still a child, when years
   Had painted manhood on my cheek, was I;
   For yet I lived like one not born to die;
A thriftless prodigal of smiles and tears,
No hope I needed, and I knew no fears.
   But sleep, though sweet, is only sleep; and waking,
   I waked to sleep no more, at once o’ertaking
The vanguard of my age, with all arrears
Of duty on my back. Nor child, nor man,
   Nor youth, nor sage, I find my head is grey,
For I have lost the race I never ran:
   A rathe December blights my lagging May;
And still I am a child, though I be old:
Time is my debtor for my years untold.

It’s about time for another Naomi Shihab Nye poem. I absolutely LOVE this one!

My Father and the Figtree
By Naomi Shihab Nye

For other fruits, my father was indifferent.
He’d point at the cherry trees and say,
“See those? I wish they were figs.”
In the evening he sat by my beds
weaving folktales like vivid little scarves.
They always involved a figtree.
Even when it didn’t fit, he’d stick it in.
Once Joha was walking down the road
and he saw a fig tree.
Or, he tied his camel to a fig tree and went to sleep.
Or, later when they caught and arrested him,
his pockets were full of figs.

At age six I ate a dried fig and shrugged.
“That’s not what I’m talking about! he said,
“I’m talking about a fig straight from the earth—
gift of Allah!—on a branch so heavy
it touches the ground.
I’m talking about picking the largest, fattest, sweetest fig
in the world and putting it in my mouth.”
(Here he’d stop and close his eyes.)

Years passed, we lived in many houses,
none had figtrees.
We had lima beans, zucchini, parsley, beets.
“Plant one!” my mother said.
but my father never did.
He tended garden half-heartedly, forgot to water,
let the okra get too big.
“What a dreamer he is. Look how many
things he starts and doesn’t finish.”

The last time he moved, I got a phone call,
My father, in Arabic, chanting a song
I’d never heard. “What’s that?”
He took me out back to the new yard.
There, in the middle of Dallas, Texas,
a tree with the largest, fattest,
sweetest fig in the world.
“It’s a fig tree song!” he said,
plucking his fruits like ripe tokens,
emblems, assurance
of a world that was always his own.

This was written by my aunt’s brother for the dedication of his statue, The Angelas, in San Angelo, Texas earlier this month. It was inspired by Wallace Stevens’s Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.

More than Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Sculpture
By John Noelke

1. Two women walk side by side in the pasture, looking.

2. Two blades of grass stand in the wind. Prevailing, perennial.

3. Women, more than one, advance toward equality with certainty. I wouldn’t underestimate them.

4. A culture travels through crushing hardships then and now. Right now, with dignity, with grace, with generosity, with warmth. She has made it to here. She has further to go.

5. A woman far away in 15th century Italy has a sister die. She has a single vision of a procession of women. She begins to educate young women in their homes, in this world. She builds a movement.

6. Movement.

7. The namesake of the city, Carolina Angela de la Garza DeWitt, finally arrives here in person to stand tall for her culture, for women, for untold stories, for recognition long overdue. Of the two, she is the stronger.

8. A woman dies in a car accident on a highway outside Mertzon. Her story is here.

9. The woman who made the difference in your life—it’s her hands, her cotton dress, her smell, her thinking of you. You thinking of her.

10. A young woman with little physical means has a dream of a life that sings. She looks across that river.

11. A woman’s voice pushes off her back foot. Much depends on that back foot.

12. Two nine foot hearts.

13. Flowing molten bronze resolve.

14. Eva Conzuela Tucker, in a classroom.

15. Olga Munoz. Christina Guadarrama. Daniella.

16. A woman sits in a dark room. There’s nothing in the ice box. She doesn’t know how she’s going to make it. She is by still waters.

17. Urgency, like a grassfire.

18. A woman bends over in the pasture and picks up a feather.

19. She writes a letter in Spanish.

20. A woman pulls a calf at midnight on Christmas Eve and slaps it hard in the dirt to get it breathing. It might. It might not.

21. Joy like rain coming.

22. Joy like plum trees, dark plums.

23. Joy like iced tea with the right amount of sugar.

24. They need one another, right now.

25. Through no rain, forever.

26. A woman cleans houses for a living. She goes home and reads Shakespeare.

27. A woman lays in bed dreaming of the Nazis coming through the South pasture.

28. A girl sits in a classroom in Eldorado, Eden, Paint Rock, Big Lake, Miles, Wall, Watervalley, Christoval. She is too shy to raise her hand.

29. A teacher sees deep into dark eyes. She sees a whole river. Movement.

30. Your heart at its highest mark. Your pasture at its greenest. Recuerdo.

31. There are many things in the pasture no one ever sees.

32. There are many things in a city that no one ever sees.

33. It’s easy to find a large bunch of sheep, two or three hundred. It’s hard to find ones and twos on a hot afternoon in the deep shade of cedars.

34. If you had one hundred worries, what would you do?

35. Two blades of grass waver in the wind, barely discernible.

36. Empathy leapt forth like horses uncontained.

37. They are not two figures; they are one figure.

I’m in an inexplicably good mood today.

Most glorious Lord of life, that on this day
By Edmund Spenser

Most glorious Lord of life, that on this day
Didst make thy triumph over death and sin,
And having harrowed hell, didst bring away
Captivity thence captive, us to win:
This joyous day, dear Lord, with joy begin,
And grant that we, for whom thou diddest die,
Being with thy dear blood clean washed from sin,
May live forever in felicity:
And that thy love we weighing worthily,
May likewise love thee for the same again;
And for thy sake, that all like dear didst buy,
May love with one another entertain.
   So let us love, dear love, like as we ought,
   Love is the lesson which the Lord us taught.

As I’ve said before, I’m not a huge fan of LMA’s poetry, but I had to save this one. It may have something to do with me being a daddy’s girl. Also, I read the Pilgrim’s Progress when I was in college, mostly because I’d always heard about it in LMA’s books and wanted to see what it was all about. I even wrote a paper about it for one of my religion classes.

To My Father on His 86th Birthday
By Louisa May Alcott

Dear Pilgrim, waiting patiently,
The long, long journey nearly done,
Beside the sacred stream that flows
Clear shining in the western sun;
Look backward on the varied road
Your steadfast feet have trod,
From youth to age, through weal and woe,
Climbing forever nearer God.

Mountain and valley lie behind;
The slough is crossed, the wicket passed;
Doubt and despair, sorrow and sin,
Giant and fiend, conquered at last.
Neglect is changed to honor now;
The heavy cross may be laid down;
The white head wins and wears at length
The prophet’s, not the martyr’s crown.

Greatheart and Faithful gone before,
Brave Christiana, Mercy sweet,
Are Shining Ones who stand and wait
The weary wanderer to greet.
Patience and Love his handmaids are,
And till time brings release,
Christian may rest in that bright room
Whose windows open to the east.

The staff set by, the sandals off,
Still pondering the precious scroll,
Serene and strong, he waits the call
That frees and wings a happy soul.
Then, beautiful as when it lured
The boy’s aspiring eyes,
Before the pilgrim’s longing sight
Shall the Celestial City rise.

Yep, still loving the sonnets!

Sunken Gold
By Eugene Lee-Hamilton

In dim green depths rot ingot-laden ships;
And gold doubloons, that from the drowned hand fell,
Lie nestled in the ocean-flower’s bell
With love’s old gifts, once kissed by long-drowned lips;
And round some wrought gold cup the sea-grass whips,
And hides lost pearls, near pearls still in their shell,
Where sea-weed forests fill each ocean dell
And seek dim sunlight with their restless tips.
So lie the wasted gifts, the long-lost hopes
Beneath the now hushed surface of myself,
In lonelier depths than where the diver gropes;
They lie deep, deep; but I at times behold
In doubtful glimpses, on some reefy shelf
The gleam of irrecoverable gold.

I just came across this poem and I really like it. Short and sweet…

Quiet Girl
By Langston Hughes

I would liken you
To a night without stars
Were it not for your eyes.
I would liken you
To a sleep without dreams
Were it not for your songs.

It’s been a while since I posted an ESVM and I was just collecting some poems to send to a friend and I chose this one, so I thought I’d post it.

The Plaid Dress
By Edna St. Vincent Millay

Strong sun, that bleach
The curtains of my room, can you not render
Colourless this dress I wear?—
This violent plaid
Of purple angers and red shames; the yellow stripe
Of thin but valid treacheries; the flashy green of kind deeds done
Through indolence high judgments given here in haste;
The recurring checker of the serious breach of taste?

No more uncoloured than unmade,
I fear, can be this garment that I may not doff;
Confession does not strip it off,
To send me homeward eased and bare;

All through the formal, unoffending evening, under the clean
Bright hair,
Lining the subtle gown… it is not seen,
But it is there.

Evidently I have grown resistent to PM cold pills, Excedrin PM, and melatonin. I guess I’ll have to get something else today (like Unisom at Jennifer’s recommendation) or I’ll never get any sleep!

To Sleep
By Lord Alfred Douglas

Ah, Sleep, to me thou com’st not in the guise
Of one who brings good gifts to weary men,
Balm for the bruised hearts and fancies alien
To unkind truth, and drying for sad eyes.
I dread the summons to that fierce assize
Of all my foes and woes, that waits me when
Thou mak’st my soul the unwilling denizen
Of they dim troubled house where unrest lies.

My soul is sick with dreaming, let it rest.
False sleep, thou hast conspired with Wakefulness,
I will not praise thee, I too long beguiled
With idle tales. Where is thy soothing breast?
Thy peace, thy poppies, thy forgetfulness?
Where is thy lab for me so tired a child?

I haven’t posted anything by Anne Sexton before because I hadn’t read much of her stuff and didn’t think I’d like it much. On the contrary, I find some of her poetry incredibly moving. (P.S. I recognized the title as being from Macbeth before I read the footnote!)

All My Pretty Ones
By Anne Sexton

                        All my pretty ones?
Did you say all? O hell-kite! All?
What! all my pretty chickens and their dam
At one fell swoop?…
I cannot but remember such things were,
That were most precious to me.
—Macbeth

Father, this year’s jinx rides us apart
where you followed our mother to her cold slumber;
a second shock boiling its stone to your heart,
leaving me here to shuffle and disencumber
you from the residence you could not afford:
a gold key, your half of a woolen mill,
twenty suits from Dunne’s, an English Ford,
the love and legal verbiage of another will,
boxes of pictures of people I do not know.
I touch their cardboard faces. They must go.

But the eyes, as thick as wood in this album,
hold me. I stop here, where a small boy
waits in a ruffled dress for someone to come…
for this soldier who holds his bugle like a toy
or for this velvet lady who cannot smile.
Is this your father’s father, this commodore
in a mailman suit? My father, time meanwhile
has made it unimportant who you are looking for.
I’ll never know what these faces are all about.
I lock them into their book and throw them out.

This is the yellow scrapbook that you began
the year I was born; as crackling now and wrinkly
as tobacco leaves: clippings where Hoover outran
the Democrats, wiggling his dry finger at me
and Prohibition; news where the Hindenburg went
down and recent years where you went flush
on war. This year, solvent but sick, you meant
to marry that pretty widow in a one-month rush.
But before you had that second chance, I cried
on your fat shoulder. Three days later you died.

These are the snapshots of marriage, stopped in places.
Side by side at the rail toward Nassau now;
here, with the winner’s cup at the speedboat races,
here, in tails at the Cotillion, you take a bow,

here, by our kennel of dogs with their pink eyes,
running like show-bred pigs in their chain-link pen;
here, at the horseshow where my sister wins a prize;
and here, standing like a duke among groups of men.
Now I fold you down, my drunkard, my navigator,
my first lost keeper, to love or look at later.

I hold a five-year diary that my mother kept
for three years, telling all she does not say
of your alcoholic tendency. You overslept,
she writes. My God, father, each Christmas Day
with your blood, will I drink down your glass
of wine? The diary of your hurly-burly years
goes to my shelf to wait for my age to pass.
Only in this hoarded span will love persevere.
Whether you are pretty or not, I outlive you,
bend down my strange face to yours and forgive you.

I was taking it easy last night and making blanket squares while listening to the awesome Celtic mixes that my dear Heather made for me. When we got to From the North by Runrig, I had to pop in the RotK EE because that song makes me think of Aragorn. I’ve also been reading a book of sonnets, and came across this one, which I studied in high school. I’ve always liked it and now that I’ve become immersed in the world of LotR, I realized how much it makes me think of Gondor and all the statues of kings and such.

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
By William Shakespeare

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone, besmear’d with sluttish time.
When wasteful war shall statues overturn,
And broils root out the work of masonry,
Nor Mars his sword nor war’s quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.
‘Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity
Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room,
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.
So, till the judgment that yourself arise,
You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes.

I find the complete difference of tone between Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience fascinating. Guess which one this selection is from!

The Garden of Love
By William Blake

I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen:
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut,
And “Thou shalt not” writ over the door;
So I turned to the Garden of Love
That so many sweet flowers bore;

And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tomb-stones where flowers should be;
And Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briers my joys & desires.

Yep, still sick. In fact, I’ve hardly moved from my bed all day (my computer is two feet from my bed). Despite the fact that I took two multi-symptom cold pills (the ones that are supposed to make you drowsy) and two Excedrin PM pills before I went to bed last night, I still woke up repeatedly during the night. This may be why I slept for most of the morning (after a brief trip to school) and most of the afternoon. Chances of sleeping tonight: NIL! During my more lucid moments, I read more sonnets, though.

Care-charmer Sleep, son of the sable Night
By Samuel Daniel

Care-charmer Sleep, son of the sable Night,
Brother to Death, in silent darkness born,
Relieve my languish and restore the light
With dark forgetting of my care’s return.
And let the day be time enough to mourn
The shipwreck of my ill-adventured youth;
Let waking eyes suffice to wail their scorn,
Without the torment of the night’s untruth.
Cease, dreams, the images of day-desires,
To model forth the passion of the morrow;
Never to let rising sun approve you liars,
To add more grief to aggravate my sorrow.
   Still let me sleep, embracing clouds in vain;
   And never wake to feel the day’s disdain.

I just watched Pirates of the Caribbean from my sick couch, so I’m feeling particularly watery.

The City in the Sea
By Edgar Allan Poe

Lo! Death has reared himself a throne
In a strange city lying alone
Far down within the dim West,
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest.
There shrines and palaces and towers
(Time-eaten towers that tremble not!)
Resemble nothing that is ours.
Around, by lifting winds forgot,
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters he.

No rays from the holy heaven come down
On the long night-time of that town;
But light from out the lurid sea
Streams up the turrets silently—
Gleams up the pinnacles far and free—
Up domes—up spires—up kingly halls—
Up fanes—up Babylon-like walls—
Up shadowy long-forgotten bowers
Of sculptured ivy and stone flowers—
Up many and many a marvellous shrine
Whose wreathed friezes intertwine
The viol, the violet, and the vine.
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.
So blend the turrets and shadows there
That all seem pendulous in air,
While from a proud tower in the town
Death looks gigantically down.

There open fanes and gaping graves
Yawn level with the luminous waves;
But not the riches there that lie
In each idol’s diamond eye-
Not the gaily-jewelled dead
Tempt the waters from their bed;
For no ripples curl, alas!
Along that wilderness of glass—
No swellings tell that winds may be
Upon some far-off happier sea—
No heavings hint that winds have been
On seas less hideously serene.

But lo, a stir is in the air!
The wave—there is a movement there!
As if the towers had thrust aside,
In slightly sinking, the dull tide—
As if their tops had feebly given
A void within the filmy Heaven.
The waves have now a redder glow—
The hours are breathing faint and low—
And when, amid no earthly moans,
Down, down that town shall settle hence,
Hell, rising from a thousand thrones,
Shall do it reverence.

I seem to have contracted some illness, which is beginning with a sore throat. I am not pleased.

Sanctuary
By Elinor Wylie

This is the bricklayer; hear the thud
Of his heavy load dumped down on stone.
His lustrous bricks are brighter than blood,
His smoking mortar whiter than bone.

Set each sharp-edged, fire-bitten brick
Straight by the plumb-line’s shivering length;
Make my marvelous wall so thick
Dead nor living may shake its strength.

Full as a crystal cup with drink
Is my cell with dreams, and quiet, and cool…
Stop, old man! You must leave a chink;
How can I breathe? You can’t, you fool!

After spending such a lovely weekend in the presence of greatness and hearing numerous speeches, I felt the need to post this poem. You can hear a reading of it by the second paddler from the National Canoe Journal.

Famous
By Naomi Shihab Nye

The river is famous to the fish.

The loud voice is famous to silence,
which knew it would inherit the earth
before anybody said so.

The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds
watching him from the birdhouse.

The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.

The idea you carry close to your bosom
is famous to your bosom.

The boot is famous to the earth,
more famous than the dress shoe,
which is famous only to floors.

The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it
and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.

I want to be famous to shuffling men
who smile while crossing streets,
sticky children in grocery lines,
famous as the one who smiled back.

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,
but because it never forgot what it could do.

So I had the most amazing weekend. I’ll have to post about it in the next couple days, but I don’t have time right now. My aunt’s brother talked about this poem, though, so I had to post it. (Incidentally, he also wrote a poem patterened after this, which I will post once I get my hands on it. I love knowing incredibly talented people!)

Thirteen Ways Of Looking At A Blackbird
By Wallace Stevens

I

Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the black bird.

II

I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III

The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV

A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V

I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

VI

Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

VII

O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII

I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

IX

When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X

At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI

He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

XII

The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

XIII

It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

I’m going to West Texas for the weekend, so there probably won’t be a PotD tomorrow, as I’ll be incommunicado. I am taking some books of poetry, including Amy Lowell’s Complete Poetical Works. Here’s a sample:

Convalescence
By Amy Lowell

From out the dragging vastness of the sea,
Wave-fettered, bound in sinuous, seaweed strands,
He toils toward the rounding beach, and stands
One moment, white and dripping, silently,
Cut like a cameo in lazuli,
Then falls, betrayed by shifting shells, and lands
Prone in the jeering water, and his hands
Clutch for support where no support can be.
So up, and down, and forward, inch by inch,
He gains upon the shore, where poppies glow
And sandflies dance their little lives away.
The sucking waves retard, and tighter clinch
The weeds about him, but the land-winds blow,
And in the sky there blooms the sun of May.

Here’s another sonnet…

An upper chamber in a darkened house
By Frederick Goddard Tuckerman

An upper chamber in a darkened house,
Where, ere his footsteps reached ripe manhood’s brink,
Terror and anguish were his cup to drink;
I cannot rid the thought, nor hold it close
But dimly dream upon that man alone:
Now though the autumn clouds most softly pass,
The cricket chides beneath the doorstep stone
And greener than the season grows the grass.
Nor can I drop my lids nor shade my brows,
But there he stands beside the lifted sash;
And with a swooning of the heart, I think
Where the black shingles slope to meet the boughs
And,shattered on the roof like smallest snows,
The tiny petals of the mountain ash.

I found a collection of sonnets that I haven’t read in ages. There are some marked (goodness knows how long ago I did that!) so I thought I’d post one.

Come, Sleep, O Sleep! the certain knot of peace
By Sir Philip Sidney

Come, Sleep! O Sleep! the certain knot of peace,
The baiting place of wit, the balm of woe,
The poor man’s wealth, the prisoner’s release,
Th’ indifferent judge between the high and low;
With shield of proof shield me from out the prease
Of those fierce darts despair at me doth throw:
O make in me those civil wars to cease;
I will good tribute pay, if thou do so.
Take thou of me smooth pillows, sweetest bed,
A chamber deaf to noise and blind to light,
A rosy garland, and a weary head:
And if these things, as being thine by right,
Move not thy heavy grace, thou shalt in me,
Livelier than elsewhere, Stella’s image see.

Since I’m going to see this on Thursday, I decided to reread Macbeth tonight. This is probably my favorite Shakespearean play, possibly because we spent months studying it in AP English in HS. Blood? Violence? Betrayal? Insanity? Ambition? Crazy Scots killing each other? Macbeth has it all, not to mention freaky witches, from whom we get today’s selection. (I previously posted my favorite passage.)

Double, double, toil and trouble
FROM MACBETH, ACT IV, SCENE I
By William Shakespeare

FIRST WITCH
Round about the cauldron go;
In the poison’d entrails throw;
Toad, that under cold stone
Days and nights has thirty-one
Swelt’red venom sleeping got,
Boil thou first i’ th’ charmed pot.
ALL
Double, double, toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.
SECOND WITCH
Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the cauldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog,
Adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting,
Lizard’s leg and howlet’s wing,
For a charm of pow’rful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
ALL
Double, double, toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.
THIRD WITCH
Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf,
Witch’s mummy, maw and gulf
Of the ravin’d salt-sea shark,
Root of hemlock digg’d i’ th’ dark,
Liver of blaspheming Jew,
Gall of goat, and slips of yew
Silver’d in the moon’s eclipse,
Nose of Turk and Tartar’s lips,
Finger of birth-strangled babe
Ditch-deliver’d by a drab,
Make the gruel thick and slab.
Add thereto a tiger’s chawdron,
For th’ ingredience of our cau’dron.
ALL
Double, double, toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.
SECOND WITCH
Cool it with a baboon’s blood,
Then the charm is firm and good.

I just stumbled across this poem. I had some chamomile tea last night and it didn’t help me sleep at all. In fact, I had awful insomnia. Of course, that has nothing to do with this poem…

Camomile Tea
By Katherine Mansfield

Outside the sky is light with stars;
There’s a hollow roaring from the sea.
And, alas! for the little almond flowers,
The wind is shaking the almond tree.

How little I thought, a year ago,
In the horrible cottage upon the Lee
That he and I should be sitting so
And sipping a cup of camomile tea.

Light as feathers the witches fly,
The horn of the moon is plain to see;
By a firefly under a jonquil flower
A goblin toasts a bumble-bee.

We might be fifty, we might be five,
So snug, so compact, so wise are we!
Under the kitchen-table leg
My knee is pressing against his knee.

Our shutters are shut, the fire is low,
The tap is dripping peacefully;
The saucepan shadows on the wall
Are black and round and plain to see.

ESVM wrote this after Sacco and Vanzetti were executed, in all likelihood for a crime they did not commit. Many (including ESVM) had lobbied for their lives, but were ignored by the powers that be.

Justice Denied in Massachusetts
By Edna St. Vincent Millay

Let us abandon then our gardens and go home
And sit in the sitting-room
Shall the larkspur blossom or the corn grow under this cloud?
Sour to the fruitful seed
Is the cold earth under this cloud,
Fostering quack and weed, we have marched upon but cannot conquer;
We have bent the blades of our hoes against the stalks of them.

Let us go home, and sit in the sitting room.
Not in our day
Shall the cloud go over and the sun rise as before,
Beneficent upon us
Out of the glittering bay,
And the warm winds be blown inward from the sea
Moving the blades of corn
With a peaceful sound.

Forlorn, forlorn,
Stands the blue hay-rack by the empty mow.
And the petals drop to the ground,
Leaving the tree unfruited.
The sun that warmed our stooping backs and withered the weed uprooted—
We shall not feel it again.
We shall die in darkness, and be buried in the rain.

What from the splendid dead
We have inherited—
Furrows sweet to the grain, and the weed subdued—
See now the slug and the mildew plunder.
Evil does overwhelm
The larkspur and the corn;
We have seen them go under.

Let us sit here, sit still,
Here in the sitting-room until we die;
At the step of Death on the walk, rise and go;
Leaving to our children’s children the beautiful doorway,
And this elm,
And a blighted earth to till
With a broken hoe.

I’m about 3/4 done with Jasper Fforde’s Something Rotten (and loving it!). A stanza of today’s poem (the bolded one) is at the beginning of Chapter 28, so I thought I’d share it.

A Psalm of Life
What the Heart of the Young Man Said to the Psalmist
By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
Find us farther than to-day.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world’s broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!

Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act, - act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God o’erhead!

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.

I remember studying this poem in HS and I’ve always liked it.

Because I could not stop for Death—
By Emily Dickinson

Because I could not stop for Death—
He kindly stopped for me—
The Carriage held but just Ourselves—
And Immortality.

We slowly drove—He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility—

We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess—in the Ring—
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain—
We passed the Setting Sun—

Or rather—He passed Us—
The Dews drew quivering and chill—
For only Gossamer, my Gown—
My Tippet—only Tulle—

We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground—
The Roof was scarcely visible—
The Cornice—in the Ground—

Since then—’tis Centuries—and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses’ Heads
Were toward Eternity—