2nd quarter

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

William Butler Yeats

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin there, of clay and wattles made:

Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

There midnight’s all a glimmer, a noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,

I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

Mid-Term Break

Seamus Heaney

I sat all morning in the college sick bay

Counting bells knelling classes to a close.

At two o’clock our neighbors drove me home.

In the porch I met my father crying—

He had always taken funerals in his stride—

And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram

When I came in, and I was embarrassed

By old men standing up to shake my hand

And tell me they were “sorry for my trouble,”

Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,

Away at school, as my mother held my hand

In hers and coughed out angry, tearless sighs.

At ten o’clock the ambulance arrived

With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.

Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops

And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him

For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,

Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,

He lay in the four foot box as in his cot.

No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

A four foot box, a foot for every year.

from The Man with the Blue Guitar

Wallace Stevens

The man bent over his guitar,

A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, “You have a blue guitar,

You do not play things as they are.”

The man replied, “Things as they are

Are changed upon the blue guitar.”

And they said then, “But play, you must,

A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

A tune upon the blue guitar

Of things exactly as they are.”

from Howl

Allen Ginsberg

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness

starving, hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the Negro streets at dawn looking

for an angry fix.

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection

to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking

in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across

the tops of cities contemplating jazz,

who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw

Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,

who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes

hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the

scholars of war,

who were expelled from academies for crazy & publishing

obscene odes on the windows of the skull,

who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their

money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through

the wall,

who ate fire in paint hotels or drank Turpentine in Paradise

Alley, death or purgatoried their torsos night after night

with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, and alcohol

who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar

to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,

yacketyakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and

memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of

hospitals and jails and wars,

who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off

the roof waving genitals and manuscripts

who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully,

gave up and were forced to open antique stores where

they thought they were growing old and cried . . .

.

this is just to say

William Carlos Williams

I have eaten

the plums

that were in

the icebox

and which

you were probably

saving

for breakfast

Forgive me

they were delicious

so sweet

and so cold

Writing

Jan Dean

and then i saw it

saw it all all the mess

and blood and everythink

and mam agenst the kichin dor

the flor all stiky

and the wall all wet

and red an dad besid the kichen draw

i saw it saw it all

an wrot it down an ever word of it is tru

You must take care to write in sentences,

Check your spellings and your paragraphs.

Is this finished? It is rather short.

Perhaps next time you will have more to say.

How to Write a Poem about the Sky

Leslie Marmon Silko

FOR THE STUDENTS OF THE BETHEL, MIDDLE SCHOOL, BETHEL, ALASKA—FEB. 1975

You see the sky now

colder than the frozen river

so dense and white

little birds

walk across it.

You see the sky now

but the earth

is lost in it

and there are no horizons.

It is all

a single breath.

You see the sky

but the earth is called

by the same name

the moment

the wind shifts

sun splits it open

and bluish membranes

push through slits of skin.

You see the sky

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Robert Frost

Nature’s first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf’s a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

The English are So Nice!

D. H. Lawrence

The English are so nice

So awfully nice

They are the nicest people in the world.

And what’s more, they’re very nice about being nice

About your being nice as well!

If you’re not nice they soon make you feel it.

Americans and French and Germans and so on

They’re all very well

but they’re not really nice, you know.

They’re not nice in our sense of the word, are they now?

That’s why one doesn’t have to take them seriously.

We must be nice to them, of course,

Of course, naturally.

But it doesn’t really matter what you say to them,

They don’t really understand

You can just say anything to them:

Be nice, you know, just nice

But you must never take them seriously, they wouldn’t understand,

Just be nice, you know! oh, fairly nice,

Not too nice, of course, they take advantage

But nice enough, just nice enough

To let them feel they’re not quite as nice as they might be.

.

Oh, Oh

William Hathaway

My girl and I amble a country lane,

moo cows chomping daisies, our own

sweet saliva green with grass stems.

“Look, look,” she says at the crossing,

“the choo-choo’s light is on.” And sure

enough, right smack dab in the middle

of maple dappled summer sunlight

is the lit headlight—so funny.

An arm waves to us from the black window.

We wave gaily to the arm. “When I hear

trains at night I dream of being president,”

I say dreamily. “And me first lady,” she

says loyally. So when the last boxcars,

named after wonderful, faraway places,

and the caboose chuckle by we look

eagerly to the road ahead. And there,

poised and growling, are fifty Hell’s Angels.

Behind Grandma’s House

Gary Soto

At ten I wanted fame. I had a comb

and two Coke bottles, a tube of Bryl-cream.

I borrowed a dog, one with

Mismatched eyes and a happy tongue,

And wanted to prove I was tough

In the alley, kicking over trash cans,

A dull chime of tuna cans falling.

I hurled light bulbs like grenades

And men teachers held their heads

Fingers of blood lengthening

On the ground. I flicked rocks at cats,

Their goofy faces spurred with foxtails.

I kicked fences. I shooed pigeons.

I broke a branch from a flowering peach

And frightened ants with a stream of spit.

I said, “Chale,” “In your face,” and “No way

Daddy-O” to an imaginary priest

Until grandma came into the alley,

Her apron flapping in a breeze,

Her hair mussed, and said, “Let me help you,”

this is a photograph of me

Margaret Atwood

It was taken some time ago.

At first it seems to be

a smeared

print: blurred lines and grey flecks

blended with the paper;

then, as you scan

it, you see in the left-hand corner

a thing that is like a branch: part of a tree

(basalm or spruce) emerging

and, to the right, halfway up

what ought to be a gentle

slope, a small frame house.

In the background there is a lake,

and beyond that, some low hills.

(The photograph was taken

the day after I drowned.

I am in the lake, in the center

of the picture, just under the surface.

It is difficult to say where

precisely, or to say

how large or small I am:

the effect of water

on light is a distortion

but if you look long enough,

eventually

you will be able to see me.)

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

Wallace Stevens

I

Among twenty snowy mountains

The only moving thing

Was the eye of the blackbird.

II

I was of three minds,

Like a tree

In which there are three blackbirds.

III

The blackbird whirled in 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 imagine golden birds?

Do you not see how the blackbird

Walks around the feet

Of the woman 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 by flying.

XIII

It was evening all afternoon.

It was snowing

And it was going to snow.

The blackbird sat

In the cedar limbs.

The Emperor of Ice Cream

Wallace Stevens

Call the roller of big cigars,

The muscular one, and bid him whip

In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.

Let the wenches dawdle in such dress

As they are used to wear, and let the boys

Bring flowers in last month’s newspapers

Let be be finale of seem.

The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal,

The Flea

John Donne

Mark but this flea, and mark in this,

On His Deceased Wife

John Milton

METHOUGHT I saw my late espoused Saint