Invictus by William Ernest Henley

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.


In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.


Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the horror of the shade.
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.


It matters not how straight the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

The Thought-Fox by Ted Hughes

I imagine this midnight moment's forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock's loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow
A fox's nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a moment, that now
And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
it enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.

My Sad Captains by Thom Gunn

One by one they appear in
the darkness: a few friends, and
a few with historical
names. How late they start to shine!
but before they fade they stand
perfectly embodied, all

the past lapping them like a
cloak of chaos. They were men
who, I thought, lived only to
renew the wasteful force they
spent with each hot convulsion.
They remind me, distant now.

True, they are not at rest yet,
but now that they are indeed
apart, winnowed from failures,
they withdraw to an orbit
and turn with disinterested
hard energy, like the stars.

On a Raised Beach by Hugh Macdiarmid

All is lithogenesis—or lochia,

Carpolite fruit of the forbidden tree,

Stones blacker than any in the Caaba,

Cream-coloured caen-stone, chatoyant pieces,   

Celadon and corbeau, bistre and beige,   

Glaucous, hoar, enfouldered, cyathiform,   

Making mere faculae of the sun and moon,   

I study you glout and gloss, but have

No cadrans to adjust you with, and turn again   

From optik to haptik and like a blind man run   

My fingers over you, arris by arris, burr by burr,   

Slickensides, truité, rugas, foveoles,

Bringing my aesthesis in vain to bear,

An angle-titch to all your corrugations and coigns,   

Hatched foraminous cavo-rilievo of the world,   

Deictic, fiducial stones. Chiliad by chiliad   

What bricole piled you here, stupendous cairn?   

What artist poses the Earth écorché thus,   

Pillar of creation engouled in me?

What eburnation augments you with men’s bones,   

Every energumen an Endymion yet?

All the other stones are in this haecceity it seems,   

But where is the Christophanic rock that moved?   

What Cabirian song from this catasta comes?

Deep conviction or preference can seldom   

Find direct terms in which to express itself.   

Today on this shingle shelf

I understand this pensive reluctance so well,   

This not discommendable obstinacy,

These contrivances of an inexpressive critical feeling,   

These stones with their resolve that Creation shall not be   

Injured by iconoclasts and quacks. Nothing has stirred

Since I lay down this morning an eternity ago

But one bird. The widest open door is the least liable to intrusion,   

Ubiquitous as the sunlight, unfrequented as the sun.   

The inward gates of a bird are always open.   

It does not know how to shut them.

That is the secret of its song,

But whether any man’s are ajar is doubtful.

I look at these stones and know little about them,   

But I know their gates are open too,

Always open, far longer open, than any bird’s can be,

That every one of them has had its gates wide open far longer   

Than all birds put together, let alone humanity,   

Though through them no man can see,

No man nor anything more recently born than themselves   

And that is everything else on the Earth.

I too lying here have dismissed all else.

Bread from stones is my sole and desperate dearth,   

From stones, which are to the Earth as to the sunlight   

Is the naked sun which is for no man’s sight.   

I would scorn to cry to any easier audience

Or, having cried, to lack patience to await the response.

I am no more indifferent or ill-disposed to life than death is;   

I would fain accept it all completely as the soil does;   

Already I feel all that can perish perishing in me   

As so much has perished and all will yet perish in these stones.   

I must begin with these stones as the world began.

Shall I come to a bird quicker than the world’s course ran?   

      To a bird, and to myself, a man?

      And what if I do, and further?

I shall only have gone a little way to go back again   

And be like a fleeting deceit of development,

Iconoclasts, quacks. So these stones have dismissed   

All but all of evolution, unmoved by it,

(Is there anything to come they will not likewise dismiss?)   

As the essential life of mankind in the mass

Is the same as their earliest ancestors yet

La Belle Dame Sans Merci by John Keats

I. O WHAT can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has wither’d from the lake,
And no birds sing.
II. O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms!
So haggard and so woe-begone?
The squirrel’s granary is full,
And the harvest’s done.
III. I see a lily on thy brow
With anguish moist and fever dew,
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
Fast withereth too.
IV. I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful—a faery’s child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.
V. I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She look’d at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan.
VI. I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
A faery’s song.
VII. She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild, and manna dew,
And sure in language strange she said—
“I love thee true.”
VIII. She took me to her elfin grot,
And there she wept, and sigh’d fill sore,
And there I shut her wild wild eyes
With kisses four.
IX. And there she lulled me asleep,
And there I dream’d—Ah! woe betide!
The latest dream I ever dream’d
On the cold hill’s side.
X. I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried—“La Belle Dame sans Merci
Hath thee in thrall!”
XI. I saw their starved lips in the gloam,
With horrid warning gaped wide,
And I awoke and found me here,
On the cold hill’s side.
XII. And this is why I sojourn here,
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is wither’d from the lake,
And no birds sing.

Break of Day in the Trenches by Isaac Rosenberg

The darkness crumbles away.

It is the same old druid Time as ever,

Only a live thing leaps my hand,

A queer sardonic rat,

As I pull the parapet’s poppy

To stick behind my ear.

Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew

Your cosmopolitan sympathies.

Now you have touched this English hand

You will do the same to a German

Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure

To cross the sleeping green between.

It seems you inwardly grin as you pass

Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes,

Less chanced than you for life,

Bonds to the whims of murder,

Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,

The torn fields of France.

What do you see in our eyes

At the shrieking iron and flame

Hurled through still heavens?

What quaver—what heart aghast?

Poppies whose roots are in man’s veins

Drop, and are ever dropping;

But mine in my ear is safe—

Just a little white with the dust.

for the cause

http://www.petitionbuzz.com/petitions/iomfamilylibrary

At a Standstill by Samuel Menashe

The statue, that cast

Of my solitude

Has found its niche

In this kitchen

Where I do not eat

Where the bathtub stands

Upon cat feet—

I did not advance

I cannot retreat

Father Death Blues by Allen Ginsberg

On First Looking into Chapman's Homer by John Keats

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,

   And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;

   Round many western islands have I been

Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

   That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;

   Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

   When a new planet swims into his ken;

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

   He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men

Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—

   Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Sunflower Sutra by Allan Ginsberg

I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and

sat down under the huge shade of a Southern

Pacific locomotive to look at the sunset over the

box house hills and cry.

Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron

pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts

of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed,

surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of

machinery.

The oily water on the river mirrored the red sky, sun

sank on top of final Frisco peaks, no fish in that

stream, no hermit in those mounts, just ourselves

rheumy-eyed and hungover like old bums

on the riverbank, tired and wily.

Look at the Sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray

shadow against the sky, big as a man, sitting

dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust--

--I rushed up enchanted--it was my first sunflower,

memories of Blake--my visions--Harlem

and Hells of the Eastern rivers, bridges clanking Joes

Greasy Sandwiches, dead baby carriages, black

treadless tires forgotten and unretreaded, the

poem of the riverbank, condoms & pots, steel

knives, nothing stainless, only the dank muck

and the razor-sharp artifacts passing into the

past--

and the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset,

crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog

and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye--

corolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken like

a battered crown, seeds fallen out of its face,

soon-to-be-toothless mouth of sunny air, sunrays

obliterated on its hairy head like a dried

wire spiderweb,

leaves stuck out like arms out of the stem, gestures

from the sawdust root, broke pieces of plaster

fallen out of the black twigs, a dead fly in its ear,

Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O

my soul, I loved you then!

The grime was no man's grime but death and human

locomotives,

all that dress of dust, that veil of darkened railroad

skin, that smog of cheek, that eyelid of black

mis'ry, that sooty hand or phallus or protuberance

of artificial worse-than-dirt--industrial--

modern--all that civilization spotting your

crazy golden crown--

and those blear thoughts of death and dusty loveless

eyes and ends and withered roots below, in the

home-pile of sand and sawdust, rubber dollar

bills, skin of machinery, the guts and innards

of the weeping coughing car, the empty lonely

tincans with their rusty tongues alack, what

more could I name, the smoked ashes of some

cock cigar, the cunts of wheelbarrows and the

milky breasts of cars, wornout asses out of chairs

& sphincters of dynamos--all these

entangled in your mummied roots--and you there

standing before me in the sunset, all your glory

in your form!

A perfect beauty of a sunflower! a perfect excellent

lovely sunflower existence! a sweet natural eye

to the new hip moon, woke up alive and excited

grasping in the sunset shadow sunrise golden

monthly breeze!

How many flies buzzed round you innocent of your

grime, while you cursed the heavens of the

railroad and your flower soul?

Poor dead flower? when did you forget you were a

flower? when did you look at your skin and

decide you were an impotent dirty old locomotive?

the ghost of a locomotive? the specter and

shade of a once powerful mad American locomotive?

You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a

sunflower!

And you Locomotive, you are a locomotive, forget me

not!

So I grabbed up the skeleton thick sunflower and stuck

it at my side like a scepter,

and deliver my sermon to my soul, and Jack's soul

too, and anyone who'll listen,

--We're not our skin of grime, we're not our dread

bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we're all

beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we're blessed

by our own seed & golden hairy naked

accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black

formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our

eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive

riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening

sitdown vision.

As It Was by Harriet Monroe

ONCE upon a time, when man was new in the woods of the world, when his feet were scarred with jungle thorns and his hands were red with the blood of beasts, a great king rose who gathered his neighbors together, and subdued the wandering tribes. Strange cunning was his, for he ground the stones to an edge together, and bound them with thongs to sticks; and he taught his people to pry apart the forest, and beat back the ravenous beasts. And he bade them honeycomb the mountainside with caves, to dwell therein with their women. And the most beautiful women the king took for his own, that his wisdom might not perish from the earth. And he led the young men to war and conquered all the warring tribes from the mountains to the sea. And when fire smote a great tree out of heaven, and raged through the forest till the third sun, he seized a burning brand and lit an altar to his god. And there, beside the everburning fire, he sat and made laws and did justice. And his people loved and feared him.


And the king grew old. And for seven journeys of the sun from morn to morn he moved not, neither uttered word. And the hearts of the people were troubled, but none dared speak to the king's despair; neither wise men nor warriors dared cry out unto him.


Now the youngest son of the king was a lad still soft of flesh, who had never run to battle not sat in council nor stood before the king. And his heart yearned for his father, and he bowed before his mother and said, "Give me thy blessing, for I have words within me for the king; yea, as the sea sings to the night with waves will my words roll in singing unto his grief." And his mother said, "Go, my son; for thou hast words of power and soothing, and the king shall be healed."


So the youth went forth and bowed him toward the king's seat. And the wise men and warriors laid hands upon him, and said, "Who art thou, that thou shouldst go in ahead of us to him who sitteth in darkness?" And the king's son rose, and stretched forth his arms, and said, "Unhand me and let me go, ye silent ones, who for seven sun—journeys have watched in darkness and uttered no word of light! Unhand me, for as a fig-tree with fruit, so my heart is rich with words for the king."


Then he put forth his strength and strode on singing softly, and bowed him before the king. And he spake the king's great deeds in cunning words—his wars and city-carvings and wise laws, his dominion over men and beasts and the thick woods of the earth; his greeting of the gods with fire.


And lo, the king lifted up his head and stretched forth his arms and wept. "Yea, all these things have I done," he said, "and they shall perish with me. My death is upon me, and I shall die, and the tribes I have welded together shall be broken apart, and the beasts shall win back their domain, and the green jungle shall overgrow my mansions. Lo, the fire shall go out on the altar of the gods, and my glory shall be as a crimson cloud that the night swallows up in darkness."


Then the young man lifted up his voice and cried: "Oh, king, be comforted! Thy deeds shall not pass as a cloud, neither shall thy laws be strewn before the wind. For I will carve thy glory in rich and rounded wordsyea, I will string thy deeds together in jewelled beads of perfect words that thy sons shall wear on their hearts forever."


"Verily thy words are rich with song," said the king; "but thou shalt die, and who will utter them? Like twinkling foam is the speech of man's mouth; like foam from a curling wave that vanishes in the sun."


"Nay, let thy heart believe me, oh king my father," said the youth. "For the words of my mouth shall keep step with the ripple of waves and the beating of wings; yea, they shall mount with the huge paces of the sun in heaven, that cease not for my ceasing. Men shall sound them on suckling tongues still soft with milk, they shall run into battle to the tune of thy deeds, and kindle their fire with the breath of thy wisdom. And thy glory shall be ever living, as a jewel of jasper from the earthyea, as the green jewel of jasper carven into a god for the rod of thy power, oh king, and of the power of thy sons forever."


The king sat silent till the going-down of the sun.


Then lifted he his head, and stroked his beard, and spake:


"Verily the sun goes down, and my beard shines whiter than his, and I shall die. Now therefore stand at my right hand, 0 son of my wise years, child of my dreams. Stand at my right hand, and lit thy speech to music, that men may hold in their hearts thy rounded words. Forever shalt thou keep thy place, and utter thy true tale in the ears of the race. And woe be unto them that hear thee not! Verily that generation shall pass as a cloud, and its glory shall be as a tree that withers. For thou alone shalt win the flying hours to thee, and keep the beauty of them for the joy of men forever."

Bomb by Gregory Cosro

Sorry for the eye-strain, sacrificed for format...

             Budger of history   Brake of time   You   Bomb
      Toy of universe   Grandest of all snatched sky   I cannot hate you
        Do I hate the mischievous thunderbolt   the jawbone of an ass
     The bumpy club of One Million B.C.   the mace   the flail    the axe
   Catapult Da Vinci   tomahawk Cochise   flintlock Kidd   dagger Rathbone
    Ah and the sad desparate gun of Verlaine   Pushkin   Dillinger   Bogart
 And hath not St. Michael a burning sword   St. George a lance   David a sling
 Bomb   you are as cruel as man makes you   and you're no crueller than cancer
  All Man hates you   they'd rather die by car-crash   lightning   drowning
Falling off a roof   electric-chair  heart-attack   old age   old age   O Bomb
     They'd rather die by anything but you   Death's finger is free-lance
  Not up to man whether you boom or not   Death has long since distributed its
  categorical blue   I sing thee Bomb   Death's extravagance   Death's jubilee
   Gem of Death's supremest blue   The flyer will crash   his death will differ
    with the climbor who'll fall   to die by cobra is not to die by bad pork
Some die by swamp   some by sea  and some by the bushy-haired man in the night
   O there are deaths like witches of Arc   Scarey deaths like Boris Karloff
    No-feeling deaths like birth-death   sadless deaths like old pain Bowery
  Abandoned deaths   like Capital Punishment   stately deaths like senators
   And unthinkable deaths like Harpo Marx   girls on Vogue covers   my own
     I do not know just how horrible Bombdeath is   I can only imagine
      Yet no other death I know has so laughable a preview   I scope
      a city   New York City   streaming   starkeyed   subway shelter 
        Scores and scores   A fumble of humanity   High heels bend
            Hats whelming away   Youth forgetting their combs
          Ladies not knowing what to do   with their shopping bags
            Unperturbed gum machines   Yet dangerous 3rd rail
          Ritz Brothers   from the Bronx   caught in the A train
                The smiling Schenley poster will always smile
                   Impish death   Satyr Bomb   Bombdeath
                     Turtles exploding over Istanbul
                         The jaguar's flying foot
                        soon to sink in arctic snow
                     Penguins plunged against the Sphinx
                        The top of the Empire state
                    arrowed in a broccoli field in Sicily
                 Eiffel shaped like a C in Magnolia Gardens
                       St. Sophia peeling over Sudan
                     O athletic Death   Sportive Bomb
                       the temples of ancient times
                         their grand ruin ceased
                      Electrons   Protons   Neutrons 
                         gathering Hersperean hair
                    walking the dolorous gulf of Arcady
                          joining marble helmsmen
                       entering the final ampitheater
                     with a hymnody feeling of all Troys
                        heralding cypressean torches
                         racing plumes and banners
                 and yet knowing Homer with a step of grace
                       Lo the visiting team of Present
                           the home team of Past
                       Lyre and tube together joined
                     Hark the hotdog soda olive grape
                      gala galaxy robed and uniformed 
                      commissary   O the happy stands
                      Ethereal root and cheer and boo
                     The billioned all-time attendance
                          The Zeusian pandemonium
                            Hermes racing Owens
                          The Spitball of Buddha
                            Christ striking out
                           Luther stealing third
                      Planeterium Death   Hosannah Bomb
                     Gush the final rose   O Spring Bomb
                     Come with thy gown of dynamite green
                       unmenace Nature's inviolate eye
                         Before you the wimpled Past
                   behind you the hallooing Future   O Bomb
                        Bound in the grassy clarion air
                         like the fox of the tally-ho
                  thy field the universe thy hedge the geo
                 Leap Bomb   bound Bomb   frolic zig and zag
                The stars a swarm of bees in thy binging bag
                      Stick angels on your jubilee feet
                    wheels of rainlight on your bunky seat
                     You are due and behold you are due
                       and the heavens are with you
                   hosanna incalescent glorious liaison
                 BOMB O havoc antiphony molten cleft BOOM
                    Bomb mark infinity a sudden furnace
                 spread thy multitudinous encompassed Sweep
                         set forth awful agenda
              Carrion stars   charnel planets   carcass elements
             Corpse the universe   tee-hee finger-in-the-mouth hop
                       over its long long dead Nor
                    From thy nimbled matted spastic eye
                    exhaust deluges of celestial ghouls
                      From thy appellational womb
                   spew birth-gusts of of great worms
                        Rip open your belly Bomb
               from your belly outflock vulturic salutations
               Battle forth your spangled hyena finger stumps
                       along the brink of Paradise
                         O Bomb   O final Pied Piper
                both sun and firefly behind your shock waltz
                          God abandoned mock-nude
                 beneath His thin false-talc's apocalypse
                        He cannot hear thy flute's
                        happy-the-day profanations
               He is spilled deaf into the Silencer's warty ear
                    His Kingdom an eternity of crude wax
                      Clogged clarions untrumpet Him
                        Sealed angels unsing Him
                      A thunderless God   A dead God
                       O Bomb   thy BOOM His tomb
                 That I lean forward on a desk of science
                  an astrologer dabbling in dragon prose
               half-smart about wars   bombs   especially bombs
              That I am unable to hate what is necessary to love 
                That I can't exist in a world that consents
            a child in a park   a man dying in an electric-chair
                    That I am able to laugh at all things
          all that I know and do not know   thus to conceal my pain
              That I say I am a poet and therefore love all man
           knowing my words to be the acquainted prophecy of all men
                and my unwords no less an acquaintanceship
                           That I am manifold
                     a man pursuing the big lies of gold
                      or a poet roaming in bright ashes
                    or that which I imagine myself to be 
                a shark-toothed sleep   a man-eater of dreams
                   I need not then be all-smart about bombs
              Happily so   for if I felt bombs were caterpillars
                   I'd doubt not they'd become butterflies
                         There is a hell for bombs
                      They're there   I see them there
                       They sit in bits and sing songs
                     mostly German songs
                      And two very long American songs
                    and they wish there were more songs
                   especially Russian and Chinese songs
                  and some more very long American songs
                    Poor little Bomb that'll never be 
                       an Eskimo song   I love thee 
                        I want to put a lollipop
                            in thy furcal mouth
                     A wig of Goldilocks on thy baldy bean
                  and have you skip with me Hansel and Gretel
                        along the Hollywoodian screen
                      O Bomb in which all lovely things
                   moral and physical anxiously participate
                 O fairylike plucked from the 
                          grandest universe tree 
                      O piece of heaven which gives
                     both mountain and anthill a sun
                I am standing before your fantastic lily door
                I bring you Midgardian roses   Arcadian musk
                 Reputed cosmetics from the girls of heaven
                   Welcome me   fear not thy opened door
                     nor thy cold ghost's grey memory
                   nor the pimps of indefinite weather
                       their cruel terrestial thaw
                          Oppenheimer is seated
                       in the dark pocket of Light
                    Fermi is dry in Death's Mozambique
                         Einstein his mythmouth
                 a barnacled wreath on the moon-squid's head
             Let me in   Bomb   rise from that pregnant-rat corner
                nor fear the raised-broom nations of the world
                           O Bomb I love you
                 I want to kiss your clank   eat your boom
                    You are a paean   an acme of scream
                      a lyric hat of Mister Thunder
                        O resound thy tanky knees
                     BOOM   BOOM   BOOM   BOOM   BOOM
                      BOOM ye skies and BOOM ye suns
                    BOOM BOOM ye moons   ye stars BOOM
                     nights ye BOOM   ye days ye BOOM
                 BOOM BOOM ye winds   ye clouds ye rains
                    go BANG ye lakes   ye oceans BING
                     Barracuda BOOM and cougar BOOM
                       Ubangi BOOM   orangutang 
                 BING BANG BONG BOOM   bee bear baboon
                        ye BANG ye BONG ye BING
                       the tail the fin the wing
                 Yes   Yes   into our midst a bomb will fall
                 Flowers will leap in joy their roots aching
          Fields will kneel proud beneath the halleluyahs of the wind
            Pinkbombs will blossom   Elkbombs will perk their ears
           Ah many a bomb that day will awe the bird a gentle look
                 Yet   not enough to say a bomb will fall
                  or even contend celestial fire goes out
                Know that the earth will madonna the Bomb
         that in the hearts of men to come more bombs will be born
            magisterial bombs wrapped in ermine   all beautiful
               and they'll sit plunk on earth's grumpy empires
                     fierce with moustaches of gold.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T. S. Eliot

A somewhat shortened version of Prufrock by the man himself. 

S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse

A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,

Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.

Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo

Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,

Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.

LET us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question….
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
(They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”)
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
(They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”)
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?
And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?
And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin? .      .      .      .      .      .      .      .
Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?…
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas. .      .      .      .      .      .      .      .
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep … tired … or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.
And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: “That is not what I meant at all;
That is not it, at all.”
And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
“That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.” .      .      .      .      .      .      .      .
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.
I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.