Greek

Sappho -- C. 610 B.C.

ODE TO ANACTORIA

Peer of the golden gods is he to Sappho,
He, the happy man who sits beside thee,
Heark'ning so divinely close thy lovely
Speech and dear laughter.

This it was that made to flutter wildly
Heart of mine in bosom panting wildly! . . .
Oh! I need to see thee but a little,
When, as at lightning,

Voice within me stumbles, tongue is broken,
Tingles all my flesh with subtle fire,
Ring my ears with waterfalls and thunders,
Eyes are in midnight,

And a sweat bedews me like a shower,
Tremor hunts my body down and seizes,
Till, as one about to die, I linger
Paley than grass is. . .

(Trans. William Ellery Leonard)

One Girl

1.

Like the sweet apple which reddens upon
the topmost bough,
A-top on the topmost twig,--which the
pluckers forgot, somehow,--
Forget it not, nay, but got it not, for none
could get it till now.

2.

Like the wild hyacinth flower which on the
nills is found,
Which the passing feet of the shepherds
for ever tear and wound,
Until the purple blossom is trodden in the
ground.

(Trans. D. G. Rossetti)

Round About Me (Fragment)

Round about me hum the winds of autumn,
Cool between the apple boughs; and slumber,
Flowing from the quivering leaves to earthward,
Spreads as a river.

Shakespeare

Sonnet 146

(a typical conceit)

Poor soul, the center of my sinful earth,
 pressed by those rebel powers that thee array,
Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,
Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?
Why so large cost, having so short a lease,
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?
Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,
Eat up thy charge? Is this thy body's end?
Then, soul, live thou upon thy body's loss,
And let that pine to aggravate thy store;
Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;
Within be fed, without be rich no more: --

So shall thou feed on death that feeds on men,
And death once dead, there's no more dying then.

Crabbe

Village

Thus groan the old, till by disease oppress'd
They taste a final woe, and then they rest.

Theirs is yon House that holds the parish poor,
Whose walls of mud scarce bear the broken door;
There, where the putrid vapors, flagging, play,
And the dull wheel hums doleful through the day;--
There children dwell who knew no parent's care;
Parents, who knew no children's love, dwell there!
Heart-broken matrons on their joyless bed,
Forsaken wives, and mothers never wed,
Dejected widows with unheeded tears,
And crippled age with more than childish fears;
The lame, the blind, and, far the happiest they!
The moping idiot, and the madman gay.

5

American

Walt Whitman -- 1819-1892

From: "Song of Myself"

5.

I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you,
And you must not be abased to the other.

Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat,
Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not even
the best,
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.

I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning,
How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn'd over
upon me,
And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to
my bare-stript heart,
And reach'd till you felt my beard, and reach'd till you held my feet.

Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass
all argument of the earth,
And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women
my sisters and lovers,
And that a kelson of the creation is love,
And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,
And brown ants in the little wells beneath them,
And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap'd stones, elder, mullein and
poke-weed.

6.

A child said *What is the grass?* fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more
than he.

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green
stuff woven.

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,
Bearing the owner's name some way in the corners, that we may see and
remark, and say *Whose*?

Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the
vegetation. . . .

Chinese

Li T'ai-po -- 701-762

Translated by Ezra Pound

THE RIVER-MERCHANT'S WIFE: A LETTER

While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.

At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.

At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever.
Why should I climb the lookout?

At sixteen you departed,
You went into far Ku-to-yen, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.

You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me. I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Cho-fu-Sa.

7

Eliot

Quartets

East Coker

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years--
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deaux guerres--

Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt

Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure

Because one has only learnt to get the better of words

For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which

One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture

Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate

With shabby equipment always deteriorating

In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,

Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer

By strength and submission, has already been discovered

Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope

To emulate--but there is no competition--

There is only the fight to recover what has been lost

And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions

That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.

For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older

The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated

Of dead and living. Not the intense moment

Isolated, with no before and after,

But a lifetime burning in every moment

And not the life of one man only

But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.

3

Contemporary -- Welsh

Dylan Thomas

THE CONVERSATION OF PRAYERS

The conversation of prayers about to be said
By the child going to bed and the man on the stairs
Who climbs to his dying love in her high room,
The one not caring to whom in his sleep he will move
and the other full of tears that she will be dead,

Turns in the dark on the sound they know will arise
Into the answering skies from the green ground,
From the man on the stairs and the child by his bed.
The sound about to be said in the two prayers
For the sleep in a safe land and the love who dies

Will be the same grief flying. Whom shall they calm?
Shall the child sleep unharmed or the man be crying?
The conversation of prayers about to be said
Turns on the quick and the dead, and the man on the stairs
Tonight shall find no dying but a live and warm

In the fire of his care his love in the high room.
And the child not caring to whom he climbs his prayer
Shall drown in a grief as deep as his made grave,
And mark the dark-eyed wave, through the eyes of sleep,
Dragging him up the stairs to one who lies dead.

From _The New Republic_, July, 1945.

American--Contemporary

Norman Macleod

Santo Domingo

1. THE GIRLS ARE DANCING

"Let me wear your beads, mother. I want to dance,"
the girl said.

"All right," the Indian mother answered,
And she took the turquoise from around her head.

Underneath the cottonwoods to the beat of a drum--
Underneath the umbrella of the clouds--
The girl moved softly with tablita bowed
Now to the east and now to the west,
Now to the south and now to the north--
Commanding the raindrops to come forth.

And the clouds were not angry, nor was the wind,
For her dance was subtle and her song was sweet
As raindrops splashing upon her feet.

But if it had not been for her mother
And the turquoise beads so perfectly strung,
And all her sisters dancing in unison
And the men who were beating upon the drum,
The rain would never have come so soon!

For this we thank you. And thanks again!
"We thank you and thanks again," the Santo Domingoes say
In their song when returning from cutting the wheat--
And every object of the turquoise world is peaceful, it
seems--

Even the tassels of wheat are colored with dreams.
And after the slender copper threads of the wheat are
cut,

They are soft and flaxen as the hair on a girl's head.
Even the wheatfields seem happy with their new haircut--
But most of all the Indians are at peace, it seems!
(For grain stacked in the pueblo makes good dreams)--

But before the cutting the people of the field were gay:
"The wheat was getting excited!" the Santo Domingoes say.

14

Neil Weiss

- Only poem as yet published

Song for Blackbirds

You blackbird, blackbird there;
you, who sit, you and hurl
wings after the city, you, yes.

Blackbird's wings deep seas raise
and light ligh lashed coffins,
me between, caw-caw-caw black
bird, a skate, a swing, a drift,
always my doom, you so vicious
black, let me be wings for once.

Churl, wait; it comes black for
black, the broken column, yes
terday's poem, windy thistles

graving the empty air, as you
black-black too circle square --
how snap-black you are! Sheen
of my heart, like you too, caw
ing from black and spleen where
we have been. The touch, last

25

beads from a broken rosary - Walter Kerr : Imagi VOL 4, No. 1

i

scriptease in a graveyard : i've got
suspense jolly polly suspense tricks
and tones to shake your bones but
no words to alert your nothing in the
final analysis but the whimper of
wind among torestains

read on and
run from incarnate incahoots shudder
not at surprise ending but because
there is ending your ending dear reader
as well as mine as deep as mine as well

ii

glissando of opposites: the nevertwain
shall meet yeast is waste and leaven
is heaven you take the high rood
i'll take the lieu and i'll be
in shroudland beside you cling to the
bellycold stone or fling on the wild
rhythm of tightrope ledge the long
agony the short spasm come to
the same lifebreaking halt at nous-end

17