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Sonnet 146 (William Shakespeare)
Poor soul, the center of my sinful earth,
Lord of these 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 the body’s end?
Then, soul, live thou upon thy servant’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 shalt thou feed on death, that feeds on men,
And death once dead, there’s no more dying then.
Holy Sonnet XIV (John Donne)
Batter my heart, three-person’d God; for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn and make me new.
I, like an usurp’d towne, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but Oh, to no end,
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved faine,
But am bethroth’d unto your enemie:
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot againe,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
When I Consider How My Light Is Spent (John Milton)
When I consider how my light is spent
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide;
"Doth God exact day-labor, light denied?"
I fondly ask; but Patience to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, "God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
And post o’er land and ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait.
The World Is Too Much with Us (William Wordsworth)
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.—Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
Ozymandias (Percy Bysshe Shelley)
I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert…Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Leda and the Swan (William Butler Yeats)
A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
The Oven Bird (Robert Frost)
There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past,
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.
Reuben Bright (Edwin Arlington Robinson)
Because he was a butcher and thereby
Did earn an honest living (and did right),
I would not have you think that Reuben Bright
Was any more a brute than you or I;
For when they told him that his wife must die,
He stared at them, and shook with grief and fright,
And cried like a great baby half the night,
And made the women cry to see him cry.
And after she was dead, and he had paid
The singers and the sexton and the rest,
He packed a lot of things that she had made
Most mournfully away in an old chest
Of hers, and put some copped-up cedar boughs
In with them, and tore down the slaughter-house.
George Crabbe (Edwin Arlington Robinson)
Give him the darkest inch your shelf allows,
Hide him in lonely garrets, if you will,--
But his hard, human pulse is throbbing still
With the sure strength that fearless truth endows.
In spite of all fine science disavows,
Of his plain excellence and stubborn skill
There yet remains what fashion cannot kill,
Though years have thinned the laurel from his brows.
Whether or not we read him, we can feel
From time to time the vigor of his name
Against us like a finger for the shame
And emptiness of what our souls reveal
In books that are as altars where we kneel
To consecrate the flicker, not the flame.
A Lodging for the Night (Elinor Wylie)
If I had lightly given at the first
The lightest favours that you first demanded;
Had I been prodigal and open-handed
Of this dead body in its dream immersed;
My flesh and not my spirit had been pierced:
Your appetite was casual and candid;
Thus, for an hour, had endured and ended
My love, in violation and reversed.
Alas, because I would not draw the bolt
And take you to my bed, you now assume
The likeness of an angel in revolt
Turned from a low inhospitable room,
Until your fiery image has enchanted
And ravished the poor soul you never wanted.
Sonnet for the End of a Sequence (Dorothy Parker)
So take my vows and scatter them to sea;
Who swears the sweetest is no more than human.
And say no kinder words than these of me:
‘Ever she longed for peace, but was a woman!
And thus they are, whose silly female dust
Needs little enough to clutter it and bind it,
Who meet a slanted gaze, and ever must
Go build themselves a soul to dwell behind it.’
For now I am my own again, my friend!
This scar but points the whiteness of my breast;
This frenzy, like its betters, spins an end,
And now I am my own. And that is best.
Therefore, I am immeasurably grateful
To you, for proving shallow, false, and hateful.
from In Time of War, a Sonnet Sequence (W. H. Auden)
XIV
Yes, we are going to suffer, now; the sky
Throbs like a feverish forehead; pain is real;
The groping searchlights suddenly reveal
The little natures that will make us cry,
Who never quite believed they could exist,
Not where we were. They take us by surprise
Like ugly long-forgotten memories,
And like a conscience all the guns resist.
Behind each sociable home-loving eye
The private massacres are taking place;
All Women, Jews, the Rich, the Human Race.
The mountains cannot judge us when we lie:
We dwell upon the earth; the earth obeys
The intelligent and evil till they die.
Sonnet (Richard Wilbur)
The winter deepening, the hay all in,
The barn fat with cattle, the apple-crop
Conveyed to market or the fragrant bin,
He thinks the time has come to make a stop,
And sinks half-grudging in his firelit seat,
Though with his heavy body’s full consent,
In what would be the posture of defeat,
But for that look of rigorous content.
Outside, the night dives down like one great crow
Against his cast-off clothing where it stands
Up to the knees in miles of hustled snow,
Flapping and jumping like a kind of fire,
And floating skyward its abandoned hands
In gestures of invincible desire.
Eleventh Street (Frederick Morgan)
Waking at first light in my third-floor room,
I’d wait in bed for morning’s earliest sounds:
a cough, a random call, the scraping broom
of the sidewalk sweeper starting on his rounds--
then brightly clear at last from the waking street
the milk-man’s horse clop-clopping down from Fifth,
the milk-man’s "Whoa!" when he paused at our kitchen
gate,
and the big cans clanking softly in his grip
as he went down the steps to our cook’s "Good morning,
Pete."
"Good morning, Lizzie, you’re prettier every day--"
and a moment later he’d hoist himself back on his seat,
give a loud "Geeup! And they’d clop-clop on their way--
and I’d stretch myself and yawn and scramble from bed
thinking of the endless day that lay ahead.
Think Tank (James Merrill)
Because our young were drab
And slow to grow, for Carnival we ate them,
Pennants of motley distancing the deed
In the dechlorinated crystal slab.
The harlequin all grace and greed
Made glancing mincemeat of the mirror kissed.
The scholar blotched with ich
Sank into lonely shudderings.
But at our best we were of one mind,
Did our own sick or vital things
Within a medium secured by trick
Reflections over which, day, night, the Braille
Eraser glided of the Snail
Our servant, huge and blind.
Heroic (Eavan Boland)
Sex and history. And skin and bone.
And the oppression of Sunday afternoon.
Bells called the faithful to devotion.
I was still at school and on my own.
And walked and walked and sheltered from the rain.
The patriot was made of drenched stone.
His lips were still speaking. The gun
he held had just killed someone.
I looked up. And looked at him again.
He stared past me without recognition.
I moved my lips and wondered how the rain
would taste if my tongue were made of stone.
And wished it was. And whispered so that no one
could hear it but him: make me a heroine.
Unholy Sonnet #12 (Mark Jarman)
There was a pious man upright as Job,
In fact, more pious, more upright, who prayed
The way most people thoughtlessly enjoy
Their stream of consciousness. He concentrated
On glorifying God, as some men let
Their minds create and fondle curving shadows.
And as he gained in bumper crops and cattle,
He greeted each success with grave amens.
So he was shocked, returning from the bank,
To see a flood bearing his farm away--
His cows, his kids, his wife, and all his stuff.
Swept off his feet, he cried out, "Why?" and sank.
And God grumped from his rain cloud, "I can’t say.
Just something about you pisses me of."
Post-Coitum Tristesse (Brad Leithauser)
(a variation, a monosyllabic sonnet)
Why
do
you
sigh,
roar,
fall,
all
for
some
hum-
drum
come
--mm?
Hm…
The Problem (Kate Light)
The problem with your well-oiled mind
was how easily I slipped from it, along
with everything else…Or that there was a kind
of trapdoor; or a revolving door and a strong
wind; or, more precisely, a moat and tide.
Oh god! What a moat! When I sensed that last
large iron gate swinging upward;
when--from quite far off--I heard
that huge resounding clang--I ran back fast
to pound at the--but what was the use?
Broken fists, exhausted cries, tears of hope-
lessness--you refused--you still refuse--
(and you left no cracks, nowhere to grope)
to let anyone--not even me--inside.
A Change of Weather (Floyd Skloot)
Tonight I hear the rising autumn wind
and whirling leaves. I hear the heavy rain
arrive as if released from deep within
the wind like rage, or a sudden insane
blossoming of pain, the kind that woke me
in time to hear this headlong rush of rain.
Some nights I dream of health as a calm sea.
Some nights a clearing in an alpine wood
awash in meadow grass. But it could be
a storm, a swirling tempest in the blood
like a cyclone sweeping everything clean,
leaving wreckage in its wake, death, a flood
of grief. That would be the place to begin.
Tonight I hear the rising autumn wind.
My First Poem for You (Kim Addonizio)
I like to touch your tattoos in complete
darkness, when I can’t see them. I’m sure of
where they are, know by heart the neat
lines of lightning pulsing just above
your nipple, can find, as if by instinct, the blue
swirls of water on your shoulder where a serpent
twists, facing a dragon. When I pull you
to me, taking you until we’re spent
and quiet on the sheets, I love to kiss
the pictures in your skin. They’ll last until
you’re seared to ashes; whatever persists
or turns to pain between us, they will still
be there. Such permanence is terrifying.
So I touch them in the dark, but touch them, trying.
Summer (Timothy Steele)
Voluptuous in plenty, summer is
Neglectful of the earnest ones who’ve sought her.
She best resides with what she images:
Lakes windless with profound sun-shafted water;
Dense orchards in which high-grassed heat grows thick;
The one-lane country road where, on his knees,
A boy initials soft tar with a stick;
Slow creeks which bear flecked light through depths of trees.
And he alone is summer’s who relents
In his poor enterprisings; who can sense,
In alleys petal-blown, the wealth of chance;
Or can, supine in a deep meadow, pass
Warm hours beneath a moving sky’s expanse,
Chewing the sweetness from long stalks of grass.
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