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I think continually of those who were truly great.
Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history
Through corridors of light, where the hours are suns,
Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition
Was that their lips, still touched with fire,
Should tell of the Spirit, clothed from head to foot in song.
And who hoarded from the Spring branches
The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.
What is precious, is never to forget
The essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs
Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth.
Never to deny its pleasure in the morning simple light
Nor its grave evening demand for love.
Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother
With noise and fog, the flowering of the spirit.
Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields,
See how these names are fêted by the waving grass
And by the streamers of white cloud
And whispers of wind in the listening sky.
The names of those who in their lives fought for life,
Who wore at their hearts the fire’s centre.
Born of the sun, they travelled a short while toward the sun
And left the vivid air signed with their honour. | 4 | neutral | 0.543397 | 0.032686 | 0.05409 | 0.178303 | 0.055483 | 0.543397 | 0.12189 | 0.014151 | Modern | Nature |
Barque of phosphor
On the palmy beach,
Move outward into heaven,
Into the alabasters
And night blues.
Foam and cloud are one.
Sultry moon-monsters
Are dissolving.
Fill your black hull
With white moonlight.
There will never be an end
To this droning of the surf. | 0 | anger | 0.946588 | 0.946588 | 0.009801 | 0.027975 | 0.001988 | 0.004287 | 0.006946 | 0.002416 | Modern | Nature |
The trade-wind jingles the rings in the nets around the racks by the docks on Indian River.
It is the same jingle of the water among roots under the banks of the palmettoes,
It is the same jingle of the red-bird breasting the orange-treesout of the cedars.
Yet there is no spring in Florida, neither in boskage perdu, nor on the nunnery beaches. | 4 | neutral | 0.739656 | 0.01267 | 0.067803 | 0.021994 | 0.010367 | 0.739656 | 0.0846 | 0.06291 | Modern | Nature |
Her terrace was the sand
And the palms and the twilight.
She made of the motions of her wrist
The grandiose gestures
Of her thought.
The rumpling of the plumes
Of this creature of the evening
Came to be sleights of sails
Over the sea.
And thus she roamed
In the roamings of her fan,
Partaking of the sea,
And of the evening,
As they flowed around
And uttered their subsiding sound. | 2 | fear | 0.539581 | 0.051528 | 0.075129 | 0.539581 | 0.035621 | 0.142569 | 0.114279 | 0.041292 | Modern | Nature |
As the immense dew of Florida
Brings forth
The big-finned palm
And green vine angering for life,
As the immense dew of Florida
Brings forth hymn and hymn
From the beholder,
Beholding all these green sides
And gold sides of green sides,
And blessed mornings,
Meet for the eye of the young alligator,
And lightning colors
So, in me, come flinging
Forms, flames, and the flakes of flames. | 0 | anger | 0.969653 | 0.969653 | 0.004932 | 0.004022 | 0.00142 | 0.013029 | 0.004911 | 0.002033 | Modern | Nature |
I. Springing Jack
Green wooden leaves clap light away,
Severely practical, as they
Shelter the children candy-pale,
The chestnut-candles flicker, fail . . .
The showman’s face is cubed clear as
The shapes reflected in a glass
Of water—(glog, glut, a ghost’s speech
Fumbling for space from each to each).
The fusty showman fumbles, must
Fit in a particle of dust
The universe, for fear it gain
Its freedom from my cube of brain.
Yet dust bears seeds that grow to grace
Behind my crude-striped wooden face
As I, a puppet tinsel-pink
Leap on my springs, learn how to think—
Till like the trembling golden stalk
Of some long-petalled star, I walk
Through the dark heavens, and the dew
Falls on my eyes and sense thrills through.
II. The Ape Watches “Aunt Sally”
The apples are an angel’s meat;
The shining dark leaves make clear sweet
The juice; green wooden fruits alway
Fall on these flowers as white as day—
(Clear angel-face on hairy stalk:
Soul grown from flesh, an ape’s young talk!)
And in this green and lovely ground
The Fair, world-like, turns round and round
And bumpkins throw their pence to shed
Aunt Sally’s wooden clear-striped head.—
I do not care if men should throw
Round sun and moon to make me go—
As bright as gold and silver pence . . .
They cannot drive | 2 | fear | 0.794903 | 0.130228 | 0.04003 | 0.794903 | 0.009867 | 0.011928 | 0.010996 | 0.002048 | Modern | Nature |
Turn again, turn again,
Goose Clothilda, Goosie Jane.
Bright wooden waves of people creak
From houses built with coloured straws
Of heat; Dean Pasppus’ long nose snores
Harsh as a hautbois, marshy-weak.
The wooden waves of people creak
Through the fields all water-sleek.
And in among the straws of light
Those bumpkin hautbois-sounds take flight.
Whence he lies snoring like the moon
Clownish-white all afternoon.
Beneath the trees’ arsenical
Sharp woodwind tunes; heretical—
Blown like the wind’s mane
(Creaking woodenly again).
His wandering thoughts escape like geese
Till he, their gooseherd, sets up chase,
And clouds of wool join the bright race
For scattered old simplicities. | 1 | disgust | 0.39165 | 0.109131 | 0.39165 | 0.248795 | 0.00392 | 0.136969 | 0.080342 | 0.029193 | Modern | Nature |
The moon has left the sky, love,
The stars are hiding now,
And frowning on the world, love,
Night bares her sable brow.
The snow is on the ground, love,
And cold and keen the air is.
Im singing here to you, love;
Youre dreaming there in Paris.
But this is Natures law, love,
Though just it may not seem,
That men should wake to sing, love;
While maidens sleep and dream.
Them care may not molest, love,
Nor stir them from their slumbers,
Though midnight find the swain, love.
Still halting oer his numbers.
I watch the rosy dawn, love,
Come stealing up the east,
While all things round rejoice, love,
That Night her reign has ceased.
The lark will soon be heard, love,
And on his way be winging;
When Natures poets, wake, love,
Why should a man be singing? | 0 | anger | 0.664108 | 0.664108 | 0.027195 | 0.008535 | 0.014968 | 0.05409 | 0.226706 | 0.004397 | Modern | Nature |
The buffaloes are gone.
And those who saw the buffaloes are gone.
Those who saw the buffaloes by thousands and how they pawed the prairie sod into dust with their hoofs, their great heads down pawing on in a great pageant of dusk,
Those who saw the buffaloes are gone.
And the buffaloes are gone. | 1 | disgust | 0.367825 | 0.06685 | 0.367825 | 0.042098 | 0.004811 | 0.219525 | 0.213647 | 0.085243 | Modern | Nature |
There is a wolf in me . . . fangs pointed for tearing gashes . . . a red tongue for raw meat . . . and the hot lapping of bloodI keep this wolf because the wilderness gave it to me and the wilderness will not let it go.
There is a fox in me . . . a silver-gray fox . . . I sniff and guess . . . I pick things out of the wind and air . . . I nose in the dark night and take sleepers and eat them and hide the feathers . . . I circle and loop and double-cross.
There is a hog in me . . . a snout and a belly . . . a machinery for eating and grunting . . . a machinery for sleeping satisfied in the sunI got this too from the wilderness and the wilderness will not let it go.
There is a fish in me . . . I know I came from salt-blue water-gates . . . I scurried with shoals of herring . . . I blew waterspouts with porpoises . . . before land was . . . before the water went down . . . before Noah . . . before the first chapter of Genesis.
There is a baboon in me . . . clambering-clawed . . . dog-faced . . . yawping a galoots hunger . . . hairy under the armpits . . . here are the hawk-eyed hankering men . . . here are the blonde and blue-eyed women . . . here they hide curled asleep waiting . . . ready to snarl and kill . . . ready to sing and give milk . . . waitingI keep the b | 0 | anger | 0.320018 | 0.320018 | 0.247077 | 0.167637 | 0.005118 | 0.173311 | 0.063953 | 0.022886 | Modern | Nature |
The sea-wash never ends.
The sea-wash repeats, repeats.
Only old songs? Is that all the sea knows?
Only the old strong songs?
Is that all?
The sea-wash repeats, repeats. | 6 | surprise | 0.428503 | 0.019169 | 0.014217 | 0.043115 | 0.017505 | 0.401116 | 0.076375 | 0.428503 | Modern | Nature |
I went out at night alone;
The young blood flowing beyond the sea
Seemed to have drenched my spirits wings
I bore my sorrow heavily.
But when I lifted up my head
From shadows shaken on the snow,
I saw Orion in the east
Burn steadily as long ago.
From windows in my fathers house,
Dreaming my dreams on winter nights,
I watched Orion as a girl
Above another citys lights.
Years go, dreams go, and youth goes too,
The worlds heart breaks beneath its wars,
All things are changed, save in the east
The faithful beauty of the stars. | 2 | fear | 0.854928 | 0.002475 | 0.001955 | 0.854928 | 0.001223 | 0.002781 | 0.132241 | 0.004396 | Modern | Nature |
Nightingale singing—gale of Nanking
Sing—mystery
of Ming-dynasty
sing
ing
in Ming
Syringa
Myringa
Singer
Song-winged
sing-wind
syringa
ringer
Song-wing
sing long
syringa
lingerer | 6 | surprise | 0.263526 | 0.024937 | 0.010571 | 0.156062 | 0.222974 | 0.196649 | 0.12528 | 0.263526 | Modern | Nature |
Openly, yes,
With the naturalness
Of the hippopotamus or the alligator
When it climbs out on the bank to experience the
Sun, I do these
Things which I do, which please
No one but myself. Now I breathe and now I am sub-
Merged; the blemishes stand up and shout when the object
In view was a
Renaissance; shall I say
The contrary? The sediment of the river which
Encrusts my joints, makes me very gray but I am used
To it, it may
Remain there; do away
With it and I am myself done away with, for the
Patina of circumstance can but enrich what was
There to begin
With. This elephant skin
Which I inhabit, fibered over like the shell of
The coco-nut, this piece of black glass through which no light
Can filtercut
Into checkers by rut
Upon rut of unpreventable experience
It is a manual for the peanut-tongued and the
Hairy toed. Black
But beautiful, my back
Is full of the history of power. Of power? What
Is powerful and what is not? My soul shall never
Be cut into
By a wooden spear; through-
Out childhood to the present time, the unity of
Life and death has been expressed by the circumference
Descri | 5 | sadness | 0.269804 | 0.126282 | 0.055375 | 0.188087 | 0.099775 | 0.195378 | 0.269804 | 0.065299 | Modern | Nature |
Man, looking into the sea
taking the view from those who have as much right to it as you have it to yourself
it is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing
but you cannot stand in the middle of this:
the sea has nothing to give but a well excavated grave.
The firs stand in a processioneach with an emerald turkey-foot at the top
reserved as their contours, saying nothing;
repression, however, is not the most obvious characteristic of the sea;
the sea is a collector, quick to return a rapacious look.
There are others besides you who have worn that look
whose expression is no longer a protest; the fish no longer investigate them
for their bones have not lasted;
men lower nets, unconscious of the fact that they are desecrating a grave,
and row quickly awaythe blades of the oars
moving together like the feet of water-spiders as if there were no such thing as death.
The wrinkles progress upon themselves in a phalanxbeautiful under networks of foam,
and fade breathlessly while the sea rustles in and out of the seaweed;
the birds swim through the air at top speed, emitting cat-calls as heretofore
the tortoise-shell scourges about the feet of the cliffs, in motion beneath them
and the ocean, under the pulsation of light-houses and noise of bell-buoys,
advances | 1 | disgust | 0.544048 | 0.157033 | 0.544048 | 0.057579 | 0.010076 | 0.147685 | 0.061016 | 0.022564 | Modern | Nature |
1
When the world turns completely upside down
You say well emigrate to the Eastern Shore
Aboard a river-boat from Baltimore;
Well live among wild peach trees, miles from town,
Youll wear a coonskin cap, and I a gown
Homespun, dyed butternuts dark gold color.
Lost, like your lotus-eating ancestor,
Well swim in milk and honey till we drown.
The winter will be short, the summer long,
The autumn amber-hued, sunny and hot,
Tasting of cider and of scuppernong;
All seasons sweet, but autumn best of all.
The squirrels in their silver fur will fall
Like falling leaves, like fruit, before your shot.
2
The autumn frosts will lie upon the grass
Like bloom on grapes of purple-brown and gold.
The misted early mornings will be cold;
The little puddles will be roofed with glass.
The sun, which burns from copper into brass,
Melts these at noon, and makes the boys unfold
Their knitted mufflers; full as they can hold
Fat pockets dribble chestnuts as they pass.
Peaches grow wild, and pigs can live in clover;
A barrel of salted herrings lasts a year;
The spring begins before the winters over.
By February you may find the skins
Of garter snakes and water moccasins
Dwindled and harsh, dead-whi | 5 | sadness | 0.734366 | 0.018131 | 0.010444 | 0.072024 | 0.031416 | 0.071892 | 0.734366 | 0.061728 | Modern | Nature |
Muzzle and jowl and beastly brow,
bilious glaring eyes, tufted ears,
recidivous criminality in the slouch,
—This is not the latest absconding bankrupt
but a ‘beautiful’ tiger imported at great expense from
Kuala Lumpur.
7 photographers, 4 black-and-white artists and an R.A.
are taking his profitable likeness;
28 reporters and an essayist
are writing him up.
Sundry ladies think he is a darling
especially at mealtimes, observing
that a firm near the docks advertises replicas
fullgrown on approval for easy cash payments.
?Felis Tigris (Straits Settlements) (Bobo) takes exercise
up and down his cage before feeding
in a stench of excrements of great cats
indifferent to beauty or brutality.
He is said to have eaten several persons
but of course you can never be quite sure of these things. | 1 | disgust | 0.514452 | 0.202049 | 0.514452 | 0.099151 | 0.021793 | 0.067088 | 0.068604 | 0.026864 | Modern | Nature |
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. | 5 | sadness | 0.844846 | 0.032053 | 0.063516 | 0.025912 | 0.002397 | 0.026698 | 0.844846 | 0.004577 | Modern | Nature |
At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.
He knew that he heard it,
A bird's cry at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.
The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow . . .
It would have been outside.
It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep's faded papier mâché . . .
The sun was coming from outside.
That scrawny cry—it was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,
Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality. | 2 | fear | 0.378539 | 0.208878 | 0.215074 | 0.378539 | 0.005891 | 0.087026 | 0.091259 | 0.013333 | Modern | Nature |
Quick passage into
memory and behind
only blank spaces,
blue stain on pink
litmus or merely
known so closely
something falls away
receding from touch,
caught in the air
your fingers move,
agile water-fly
padding the surface
of what is seen
even among these
defractions, bent
pencil or warps
of a flat eye,
the wide world circling. | 1 | disgust | 0.285448 | 0.174992 | 0.285448 | 0.096509 | 0.010766 | 0.280757 | 0.06807 | 0.083458 | Modern | Nature |
This tuft that thrives on saline nothingness,
Inverted octopus with heavenward arms
Thrust parching from a palm-bole hard by the cove?
A bird almost?of almost bird alarms,
Is pulmonary to the wind that jars
Its tentacles, horrific in their lurch.
The lizard’s throat, held bloated for a fly,
Balloons but warily from this throbbing perch.
The needles and hack-saws of cactus bleed
A milk of earth when stricken off the stalk;
But this,?defenseless, thornless, sheds no blood,
Almost no shadow?but the air’s thin talk.
Angelic Dynamo! Ventriloquist of the Blue!
While beachward creeps the shark-swept Spanish Main
By what conjunctions do the winds appoint
Its apotheosis, at last?the hurricane! | 2 | fear | 0.748069 | 0.031746 | 0.180652 | 0.748069 | 0.001341 | 0.012195 | 0.010573 | 0.015424 | Modern | Nature |
The star dissolved in evening—the one star
The silently
and night O soon now, soon
And still the light now
and still now the large
Relinquishing
and through the pools of blue
Still, still the swallows
and a wind now
and the tree
Gathering darkness:
I was small. I lay
Beside my mother on the grass, and sleep
Came—
slow hooves and dripping with the dark
The velvet muzzles, the white feet that move
In a dream water
and O soon now soon
Sleep and the night.
And I was not afraid.
Her hand lay over mine. Her fingers knew
Darkness,—and sleep—the silent lands, the far
Far off of morning where I should awake. | 5 | sadness | 0.743704 | 0.011104 | 0.007041 | 0.075766 | 0.049812 | 0.044452 | 0.743704 | 0.068121 | Modern | Nature |
Perspective never withers from their eyes;
They keep that docile edict of the Spring
That blends March with August Antarctic skies:
These are but cows that see no other thing
Than grass and snow, and their own inner being
Through the rich halo that they do not trouble
Even to cast upon the seasons fleeting
Though they should thin and die on last years stubble.
And they are awkward, ponderous and uncoy . . .
While we who press the cider mill, regarding them
We, who with pledges taste the bright annoy
Of friendships acid wine, retarding phlegm,
Shifting reprisals (til who shall tell us when
The jest is too sharp to be kindly?) boast
Much of our store of faith in other men
Who would, ourselves, stalk down the merriest ghost.
Above them old Mizzentop, palatial white
Hostelryfloor by floor to cinquefoil dormer
Portholes the ceilings stack their stoic height.
Long tiers of windows staring out toward former
Facesloose panes crown the hill and gleam
At sunset with a silent, cobwebbed patience . . .
See them, like eyes that still uphold some dream
Through mapled vistas, cancelled reservations!
High from the central cupola, they say
Ones glance could cross the borders of three states;
But I have seen deaths star | 5 | sadness | 0.622737 | 0.006057 | 0.006945 | 0.03996 | 0.242598 | 0.069626 | 0.622737 | 0.012077 | Modern | Nature |
I wanted you, nameless Woman of the South,
No wraith, but utterlyas still more alone
The Southern Cross takes night
And lifts her girdles from her, one by one
High, cool,
wide from the slowly smoldering fire
Of lower heavens,
vaporous scars!
Eve! Magdalene!
or Mary, you?
Whatever callfalls vainly on the wave.
O simian Venus, homeless Eve,
Unwedded, stumbling gardenless to grieve
Windswept guitars on lonely decks forever;
Finally to answer all within one grave!
And this long wake of phosphor,
iridescent
Furrow of all our traveltrailed derision!
Eyes crumble at its kiss. Its long-drawn spell
Incites a yell. Slid on that backward vision
The mind is churned to spittle, whispering hell.
I wanted you . . . The embers of the Cross
Climbed by aslant and huddling aromatically.
It is blood to remember; it is fire
To stammer back . . . It is
Godyour namelessness. And the wash
All night the water combed you with black
Insolence. You crept out simmering, accomplished.
Water rattled that stinging coil, your
Rehearsed hairdocile, alas, from many arms.
Yes, Evewraith of my unloved seed!
The Cross, a phantom, buckleddropped below the dawn.
Light drowned the lithic trillions of your spawn. | 5 | sadness | 0.899498 | 0.012604 | 0.005443 | 0.044035 | 0.003062 | 0.021252 | 0.899498 | 0.014105 | Modern | Nature |
I
Brag, sweet tenor bull,
descant on Rawthey’s madrigal,
each pebble its part
for the fells’ late spring.
Dance tiptoe, bull,
black against may.
Ridiculous and lovely
chase hurdling shadows
morning into noon.
May on the bull’s hide
and through the dale
furrows fill with may,
paving the slowworm’s way.
A mason times his mallet
to a lark’s twitter,
listening while the marble rests,
lays his rule
at a letter’s edge,
fingertips checking,
till the stone spells a name
naming none,
a man abolished.
Painful lark, labouring to rise!
The solemn mallet says:
In the grave’s slot
he lies. We rot.
Decay thrusts the blade,
wheat stands in excrement
trembling. Rawthey trembles.
Tongue stumbles, ears err
for fear of spring.
Rub the stone with sand,
wet sandstone rending
roughness away. Fingers
ache on the rubbing stone.
The mason says: Rocks
happen by chance.
No one here bolts the door,
love is so sore.
Stone smooth as skin,
cold as the dead they load
on a low lorry by night.
The moon sits on the fell
but it will rain.
Under sacks on the stone
two children lie,
hear the horse stale,
the mason whistle,
harness mutter to shaft,
felloe to axle squeak,
rut thud the rim,
crushed grit.
Stocking to stocking, jersey to jersey,
head to a hard arm,
they kiss under the rain,
bruised by their marble bed | 2 | fear | 0.501346 | 0.035525 | 0.066192 | 0.501346 | 0.008543 | 0.067942 | 0.314448 | 0.006003 | Modern | Nature |
The low sandy beach and the thin scrub pine,
The wide reach of bay and the long sky line,
O, I am sick for home!
The salt, salt smell of the thick sea air,
And the smooth round stones that the ebbtides wear,
When will the good ship come?
The wretched stumps all charred and burned,
And the deep soft rut where the cartwheel turned,
Why is the world so old?
The lapping wave, and the broad gray sky
Where the cawing crows and the slow gulls fly,
Where are the dead untold?
The thin, slant willows by the flooded bog,
The huge stranded hulk and the floating log,
Sorrow with life began!
And among the dark pines, and along the flat shore,
O the wind, and the wind, for evermore!
What will become of man? | 5 | sadness | 0.626733 | 0.036411 | 0.184307 | 0.081975 | 0.002956 | 0.037219 | 0.626733 | 0.030399 | Modern | Nature |
Anemone and aquilegia
Have sprouted in the garden
Where dorms the melancholy
Between the amour and the disdain
It comes there also our umbras
Which the night disperses
The sun that rendered them somber
With them disappears
The deities of live water
Let flow their hair
Pass it's necessary that you pursue
This beautiful umbra that you want | 5 | sadness | 0.986228 | 0.001034 | 0.002073 | 0.001025 | 0.002095 | 0.006217 | 0.986228 | 0.001328 | Modern | Nature |
For this she starred her eyes with salt
And scooped her temples thin,
Until her face shone pure of fault
From the forehead to the chin.
In coldest crucibles of pain
Her shrinking flesh was fired
And smoothed into a finer grain
To make it more desired.
Pain left her lips more clear than glass;
It colored and cooled her hand.
She lay a field of scented grass
Yielded as pasture land.
For this her loveliness was curved
And carved as silver is:
For this she was brave: but she deserved
A better grave than this. | 1 | disgust | 0.468588 | 0.397773 | 0.468588 | 0.00641 | 0.001991 | 0.046766 | 0.076792 | 0.00168 | Modern | Nature |
These hills are sandy. Trees are dwarfed here. Crows
Caw dismally in skies of an arid brilliance,
Complain in dusty pine-trees. Yellow daybreak
Lights on the long brown slopes a frost-like dew,
Dew as heavy as rain; the rabbit tracks
Show sharply in it, as they might in snow.
But it’s soon gone in the sun—what good does it do?
The houses, on the slope, or among brown trees,
Are grey and shrivelled. And the men who live here
Are small and withered, spider-like, with large eyes.
Bring water with you if you come to live here—
Cold tinkling cisterns, or else wells so deep
That one looks down to Ganges or Himalayas.
Yes, and bring mountains with you, white, moon-bearing,
Mountains of ice. You will have need of these
Profundities and peaks of wet and cold.
Bring also, in a cage of wire or osier,
Birds of a golden colour, who will sing
Of leaves that do not wither, watery fruits
That heavily hang on long melodious boughs
In the blue-silver forests of deep valleys.
I have now been here—how many years? Years unnumbered.
My hands grow clawlike. My eyes are large and starved.
I brought no bird with me, I have no cistern
Where I might find the moon, or river, or snow.
Some day, for lack of these, I’ll spin a web
Between two dusty pine-tree tops, and hang there
Face downward, like a spider | 5 | sadness | 0.308049 | 0.13988 | 0.242327 | 0.180955 | 0.002455 | 0.105717 | 0.308049 | 0.020617 | Modern | Nature |
(after Albert Cook)
All day, that
is forever,
they fall, leaves,
pine needles,
as blindly as
hours into hours
colliding,
and the chill
rain—what else
do you expect
of October?—
spilling from one
roof to another,
like words from
lips to lips, your
long incertain
say in all of this
unsure of where
the camera is
and how the light
is placed and what
it is that’s ending. | 2 | fear | 0.408543 | 0.170342 | 0.028994 | 0.408543 | 0.013649 | 0.200966 | 0.099302 | 0.078203 | Modern | Nature |
I
Cook was a captain of the Admiralty
When sea-captains had the evil eye,
Or should have, what with beating krakens off
And casting nativities of ships;
Cook was a captain of the powder-days
When captains, you might have said, if you had been
Fixed by their glittering stare, half-down the side,
Or gaping at them up companionways,
Were more like warlocks than a humble man—
And men were humble then who gazed at them,
Poor horn-eyed sailors, bullied by devils’ fists
Of wind or water, or the want of both,
Childlike and trusting, filled with eager trust—
Cook was a captain of the sailing days
When sea-captains were kings like this,
Not cold executives of company-rules
Cracking their boilers for a dividend
Or bidding their engineers go wink
At bells and telegraphs, so plates would hold
Another pound. Those captains drove their ships
By their own blood, no laws of schoolbook steam,
Till yards were sprung, and masts went overboard—
Daemons in periwigs, doling magic out,
Who read fair alphabets in stars
Where humbler men found but a mess of sparks,
Who steered their crews by mysteries
And strange, half-dreadful sortilege with books,
Used medicines that only gods could know
The sense of, but sailors drank
In simple faith. That was the captain
Cook was when he came to the Coral Se | 1 | disgust | 0.34781 | 0.21576 | 0.34781 | 0.24364 | 0.020666 | 0.081861 | 0.069988 | 0.020275 | Modern | Nature |
“In warm sunlight jade
engenders smoke”; poetry,
like indigo mountain,
keeps its distance;
the light plays words
and figures, stone’s
edge edged with air,
green haze growing.
Amused by butterflies,
Chuang Tsu dreaming,
the emperor’s heart in
spring, thoroughly transformed.
Still, in pieces, the words
rest so much apart.
Risking my life I lean
on dangerous railings.
When the dream wakes
to its own particulars,
the strands scattered,
loose hair on muslin,
broken characters
the reeds make, unmake—
vague no reason
bright again dark—
the sidewalk’s fracturing,
damp willow twig
forked there as well
locust seedpods:
Autumn, then, and
gourd music, the wind—
indistinct no-stop
break again join.
Drifting between narrow
bluffs, sharp bends
enclose us, deep
rain-cuts all around—
mountain pass, slant
sunlight and snow line,
the dream piazza
gilded into a high valley;
“haze, mist,” Kuo Hsi
interrupted, sluice-
way wedged into
a mountain like a keel;
what was said by fire-
light, the bandit in
the yellow sombrero
laughing at the window.
Chill surprise of
Chinese apples, glitter
of the Pacific between
buildings—caught in
passing, an empty
rowboat or Russian sealer
riding at anchor, Magellan
full sail in dusty curtains,
casements groan like
taut rigging, bright
s | 2 | fear | 0.463806 | 0.075886 | 0.021655 | 0.463806 | 0.023127 | 0.062981 | 0.049569 | 0.302976 | Modern | Nature |
She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.
The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard,
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.
For she was the maker of the song she sang.
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.
Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
That we should ask this often as she sang.
If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone. But it was more than that,
More even than her voice, and ours, among
The meaningless plungings of w | 2 | fear | 0.516057 | 0.044685 | 0.165244 | 0.516057 | 0.006009 | 0.088901 | 0.169013 | 0.010091 | Modern | Nature |
I speak this poem now with grave and level voice
In praise of autumn, of the far-horn-winding fall.
I praise the flower-barren fields, the clouds, the tall
Unanswering branches where the wind makes sullen noise.
I praise the fall: it is the human season.
Now
No more the foreign sun does meddle at our earth,
Enforce the green and bring the fallow land to birth,
Nor winter yet weigh all with silence the pine bough,
But now in autumn with the black and outcast crows
Share we the spacious world: the whispering year is gone:
There is more room to live now: the once secret dawn
Comes late by daylight and the dark unguarded goes.
Between the mutinous brave burning of the leaves
And winter’s covering of our hearts with his deep snow
We are alone: there are no evening birds: we know
The naked moon: the tame stars circle at our eaves.
It is the human season. On this sterile air
Do words outcarry breath: the sound goes on and on.
I hear a dead man’s cry from autumn long since gone.
I cry to you beyond upon this bitter air. | 5 | sadness | 0.836296 | 0.053079 | 0.019538 | 0.041509 | 0.024128 | 0.023232 | 0.836296 | 0.002217 | Modern | Nature |
Not that the pines were darker there,
nor mid-May dogwood brighter there,
nor swifts more swift in summer air;
it was my own country,
having its thunderclap of spring,
its long midsummer ripening,
its corn hoar-stiff at harvesting,
almost like any country,
yet being mine; its face, its speech,
its hills bent low within my reach,
its river birch and upland beech
were mine, of my own country.
Now the dark waters at the bow
fold back, like earth against the plow;
foam brightens like the dogwood now
at home, in my own country. | 2 | fear | 0.435541 | 0.047869 | 0.013998 | 0.435541 | 0.068402 | 0.033472 | 0.334845 | 0.065873 | Modern | Nature |
It is easily forgotten, year to
year, exactly where the plot is,
though the place is entirely familiar—
a willow tree by a curving roadway
sweeping black asphalt with tender leaves;
damp grass strewn with flower boxes,
canvas chairs, darkskinned old ladies
circling in draped black crepe family stones,
fingers cramped red at the knuckles, discolored
nails, fresh soil for new plants, old rosaries;
such fingers kneading the damp earth gently down
on new roots, black humus caught in grey hair
brushed back, and the single waterfaucet,
birdlike upon its grey pipe stem,
a stream opening at its foot.
We know the stories that are told,
by starts and stops, by bent men at strange joy
regarding the precise enactments of their own
gesturing. And among the women there will be
a naming of families, a counting off, an ordering.
The morning may be brilliant; the season
is one of brilliances—sunlight through
the fountained willow behind us, its splayed
shadow spreading westward, our shadows westward,
irregular across damp grass, the close-set stones.
It may be that since our walk there is faltering,
moving in careful steps around snow-on-the-mountain,
bluebells and zebragrass toward that place
between the willow and the waterfaucet, the way
is lost, that we have no practiced step there,
and | 4 | neutral | 0.363443 | 0.106728 | 0.181135 | 0.163239 | 0.031741 | 0.363443 | 0.087756 | 0.065958 | Modern | Nature |
I
“At odds again,”
hands moving out
of the shadows.
And now, now
everything seems
definite, discrete,
fingers webbed
with sunlight
the tree lets through,
arms still in their
own time, circling,
catch up, catch
hold at the wrists,
like cell chains
in a watchcrystal
completing themselves.
Together again.
Shoulders, torso,
each one of us one,
once more. It is
hard to imagine
minutes just past.
II
“At odds again,”
hands moving against
the wind like loose
flapping things,
washcloths, words
long frayed with
careless use. You
wanted to say
it was beginning
to bother you,
beginning to wish,
wondering if thought
in broken light
could ever touch
itself, reassemble
itself. The King,
our promise, broken,
the sword we imagined
gone, hovers like
leafmold in the light.
Say it, then, the stain
of things remains.
III
“At odds again,”
elbow cupped into
wet leaves. After
love, there are
moments of clutter,
and no amount of
practice will teach
you to regard them
as anything more
than what you lean
against catching
its buried chill.
Keep your fancy
to yourself; facts
do not fade but are
momentarily obscured,
the work of hands,
t | 2 | fear | 0.304982 | 0.120393 | 0.034259 | 0.304982 | 0.118658 | 0.155276 | 0.178795 | 0.087638 | Modern | Nature |
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 look out?
At sixteen you departed
You went into far Ku-to-en, 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. | 2 | fear | 0.521735 | 0.015289 | 0.03568 | 0.521735 | 0.004884 | 0.028428 | 0.388727 | 0.005257 | Modern | Nature |
Lyric night of the lingering Indian Summer,
Shadowy fields that are scentless but full of singing,
Never a bird, but the passionless chant of insects,
Ceaseless, insistent.
The grasshopper’s horn, and far-off, high in the maples,
The wheel of a locust leisurely grinding the silence
Under a moon waning and worn, broken,
Tired with summer.
Let me remember you, voices of little insects,
Weeds in the moonlight, fields that are tangled with asters,
Let me remember, soon will the winter be on us,
Snow-hushed and heavy.
Over my soul murmur your mute benediction,
While I gaze, O fields that rest after harvest,
As those who part look long in the eyes they lean to,
Lest they forget them. | 5 | sadness | 0.368997 | 0.033616 | 0.11662 | 0.330028 | 0.003225 | 0.13935 | 0.368997 | 0.008164 | Modern | Nature |
Since there is no escape, since at the end
My body will be utterly destroyed,
This hand I love as I have loved a friend,
This body I tended, wept with and enjoyed;
Since there is no escape even for me
Who love life with a love too sharp to bear:
The scent of orchards in the rain, the sea
And hours alone too still and sure for prayer
Since darkness waits for me, then all the more
Let me go down as waves sweep to the shore
In pride, and let me sing with my last breath;
In these few hours of light I lift my head;
Life is my loverI shall leave the dead
If there is any way to baffle death. | 5 | sadness | 0.863109 | 0.031258 | 0.015069 | 0.075096 | 0.0027 | 0.009234 | 0.863109 | 0.003535 | Modern | Nature |
After the whey-faced anonymity
Of river-gums and scribbly-gums and bush,
After the rubbing and the hit of brush,
You come to the South Country
As if the argument of trees were done,
The doubts and quarrelling, the plots and pains,
All ended by these clear and gliding planes
Like an abrupt solution.
And over the flat earth of empty farms
The monstrous continent of air floats back
Coloured with rotting sunlight and the black,
Bruised flesh of thunderstorms:
Air arched, enormous, pounding the bony ridge,
Ditches and hutches, with a drench of light,
So huge, from such infinities of height,
You walk on the sky’s beach
While even the dwindled hills are small and bare,
As if, rebellious, buried, pitiful,
Something below pushed up a knob of skull,
Feeling its way to air. | 1 | disgust | 0.718759 | 0.057017 | 0.718759 | 0.106589 | 0.001863 | 0.05571 | 0.050055 | 0.010006 | Modern | Nature |
Here, in the withered arbor, like the arrested wind,
Straight sides, carven knees,
Stands the statue, with hands flung out in alarm
Or remonstrances.
Over the lintel sway the woven bracts of the vine
In a pattern of angles.
The quill of the fountain falters, woods rake on the sky
Their brusque tangles.
The birds walk by slowly, circling the marble girl,
The golden quails,
The pheasants, closed up in their arrowy wings,
Dragging their sharp tails.
The inquietudes of the sap and of the blood are spent.
What is forsaken will rest.
But her heel is lifted,—she would flee,—the whistle of the birds
Fails on her breast. | 2 | fear | 0.915193 | 0.043972 | 0.00668 | 0.915193 | 0.001177 | 0.016474 | 0.011436 | 0.005068 | Modern | Nature |
This is my advice to foreigners:
call it simply—the river;
never say old muddy
or even Missouri,
and except when it is necessary
ignore the fact that it moves.
It is the river, a singular,
stationary figure of division.
Do not allow the pre-Socratic
to enter your mind except
when thinking of clear water trout
streams in north central Wyoming.
The river is a variety of land,
a kind of dark sea or great bay,
sea of greater ocean.
At times I find it good discipline
to think of it as a tree
rooted in the delta,
a snake on its topmost western branch.
These hills are not containers;
they give no vantage but that
looking out is an act of transit.
We are not confused,
we do not lose our place. | 2 | fear | 0.63151 | 0.042794 | 0.056596 | 0.63151 | 0.013882 | 0.192969 | 0.048612 | 0.013637 | Modern | Nature |
I
Geography matters.
It is the plan,
the arrangement of things
that confuses our enemies,
the difference between what
they expect and what they get;
as simple as bobbing for apples
becomes difficult, deception is
an achievement in ordering the obvious.
II
Let us make a song
for our confusion:
Call it “Red Skies over Gary”
or “Red Skies in the Sunset”
or “Red Skies and the Open Hearth.”
Red Skies over Gary,
you are my sunset,
my only home.
Let us make ourselves invisible,
not make songs, or even
disappear suddenly from
the sidewalks of Calumet.
III
Cobalt and carborundum
are refinements of the art.
So it’s true, you held
the razor in your teeth,
or was it pure magic,
a miracle of place?
One makes for workability,
the other for hardness,
and chromium bright,
the stainless achievement.
IV
I came from Calumet to Gary,
and it was early evening;
south of the mills, poppy fields
toxic red above the car lots,
have a Coke on Texaco
’til the mercury arcs devour us
and it is purple night. | 4 | neutral | 0.650894 | 0.054372 | 0.035342 | 0.14169 | 0.010669 | 0.650894 | 0.031784 | 0.075247 | Modern | Nature |
Absolute zero: the locust sings:
summer’s caught in eternity’s rings:
the rock explodes, the planet dies,
we shovel up our verities.
The razor rasps across the face
and in the glass our fleeting race
lit by infinity’s lightning wink
under the thunder tries to think.
In this frail gourd the granite pours
the timeless howls like all outdoors
the sensuous moment builds a wall
open as wind, no wall at all:
while still obedient to valves and knobs
the vascular jukebox throbs and sobs
expounding hope propounding yearning
proposing love, but never learning
or only learning at zero’s gate
like summer’s locust the final hate
formless ice on a formless plain
that was and is and comes again. | 5 | sadness | 0.76202 | 0.063413 | 0.012489 | 0.120187 | 0.006052 | 0.019901 | 0.76202 | 0.015938 | Modern | Nature |
I know what the caged bird feels, alas!
When the sun is bright on the upland slopes;
When the wind stirs soft through the springing grass,
And the river flows like a stream of glass;
When the first bird sings and the first bud opes,
And the faint perfume from its chalice steals
I know what the caged bird feels!
I know why the caged bird beats his wing
Till its blood is red on the cruel bars;
For he must fly back to his perch and cling
When he fain would be on the bough a-swing;
And a pain still throbs in the old, old scars
And they pulse again with a keener sting
I know why he beats his wing!
I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,
When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,
When he beats his bars and he would be free;
It is not a carol of joy or glee,
But a prayer that he sends from his hearts deep core,
But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings
I know why the caged bird sings! | 5 | sadness | 0.945293 | 0.007222 | 0.006118 | 0.016317 | 0.007804 | 0.008097 | 0.945293 | 0.00915 | Modern | Nature |
‘Talbingo River’—as one says of bones:
‘Captain’ or ‘Commodore’ that smelt gunpowder
In old engagements no one quite believes
Or understands. Talbingo had its blood
As they did, ran with waters huge and clear
Lopping down mountains,
Turning crags to banks.
Now it’s a sort of aching valley,
Basalt shaggy with scales,
A funnel of tobacco-coloured clay,
Smoulders of puffed earth
And pebbles and shell-bodied flies
And water thickening to stone in pocks.
That’s what we’re like out here,
Beds of dried-up passions. | 5 | sadness | 0.762386 | 0.009719 | 0.172175 | 0.010896 | 0.002434 | 0.037478 | 0.762386 | 0.004914 | Modern | Nature |
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 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.
| 2 | fear | 0.404493 | 0.090566 | 0.039001 | 0.404493 | 0.088307 | 0.072184 | 0.188385 | 0.117064 | Modern | Nature |
I
Calm was the sea to which your course you kept,
Oh, how much calmer than all southern seas!
Many your nameless mates, whom the keen breeze
Wafted from mothers that of old have wept.
All souls of children taken as they slept
Are your companions, partners of your ease,
And the green souls of all these autumn trees
Are with you through the silent spaces swept.
Your virgin body gave its gentle breath
Untainted to the gods. Why should we grieve,
But that we merit not your holy death?
We shall not loiter long, your friends and I;
Living you made it goodlier to live,
Dead you will make it easier to die.
II
With you a part of me hath passed away;
For in the peopled forest of my mind
A tree made leafless by this wintry wind
Shall never don again its green array.
Chapel and fireside, country road and bay,
Have something of their friendliness resigned;
Another, if I would, I could not find,
And I am grown much older in a day.
But yet I treasure in my memory
Your gift of charity, your mellow ease,
And the dear honour of your amity;
For these once mine, my life is rich with these.
And I scarce know which part may greater be,
What I keep of you, or you rob of me.
III
Your bark lies anchored in the peaceful bight
Until a kinder wind unfurl her sail;
| 5 | sadness | 0.907926 | 0.002211 | 0.003366 | 0.002988 | 0.042238 | 0.035752 | 0.907926 | 0.00552 | Modern | Nature |
nothing but this continent
intent on its dismay—
hands, etc. bandaged,
a torn petticoat fringed
with lace, roseate frozen
fingers, or elsewhere
feet wrapped in burlap
scuffing new snow
after the indigo of their tunics
seeps back into the soil
this spring, the several springs’
dulling thaw and incidental greenery
what marks they made were
harrowed out by those who settled,
so set themselves against the land
whether to keep the land
open to passage
or parcel it to the plow
Benton and Everett argued
“English tartars,” some said,
white savages to plunder the trade,
“only farmer and tradesman stabilize”
his head raised slightly
the dying woodsman
views the open plains,
“flat water” squalls
spilling stiff grasses
into the small shade a stand
of scrub trees gives his end
“huge skulls and whitening
bones of buffalo
were scattered everywhere”
the Conestoga’s canvas
straining to the wind,
the plow’s first bite,
the first indenture
of the rutted road,
crossties set down,
oil, asphalt glittering
quartz aggregate to the sun
the harrow’s bright discs
crumble the damp shine
of the new furrow,
the wind dulls and sifts
grassland into dust
two days in the storm cellar,
wet rags to their faces,
the slatted door impacted
with wet rags, dowery linens
strange light at the cyclone’s
onset, a | 5 | sadness | 0.777501 | 0.051241 | 0.007451 | 0.072096 | 0.010375 | 0.018997 | 0.777501 | 0.062339 | Modern | Nature |
But then there comes that moment rare
When, for no cause that I can find,
The little voices of the air
Sound above all the sea and wind.
The sea and wind do then obey
And sighing, sighing double notes
Of double basses, content to play
A droning chord for the little throats
The little throats that sing and rise
Up into the light with lovely ease
And a kind of magical, sweet surprise
To hear and know themselves for these
For these little voices: the bee, the fly,
The leaf that taps, the pod that breaks,
The breeze on the grass-tops bending by,
The shrill quick sound that the insect makes. | 3 | joy | 0.60342 | 0.004509 | 0.002898 | 0.00277 | 0.60342 | 0.126227 | 0.033453 | 0.226722 | Modern | Nature |
As others or ourselves
let’s say—furtive, then,
inconsequent and sad—
or on the edge of thought,
perhaps, or into some
predictable meandering,
the outward accelerations
of water against its shore
dissipating into erosions,
cuts and counter-cuts,
remembered as landscape,
the convenient certainties
of an abandoned past.
Is it tree or treeline
or the massing of leaves
against the sky or color
freed from shadow or something
of color deepening against shade,
the sensible bluff that heaves
above the bluff’s presumed
insensible marl? River,
again, always enclosed
by its own turnings, its
own turnings overgrown. | 2 | fear | 0.856149 | 0.029157 | 0.011317 | 0.856149 | 0.004594 | 0.054414 | 0.0362 | 0.008168 | Modern | Nature |
The incoherent rushing of the train
Dulls like a drugged pain
Numbs
To an ether throbbing of inaudible drums
Unfolds
Hush within hush until the night withholds
Only its darkness.
From the deep
Dark a voice calls like a voice in sleep
Slowly a strange name in a strange tongue.
Among
The sleeping listeners a sound
As leaves stir faintly on the ground
When snow falls from a windless sky—
A stir A sigh | 2 | fear | 0.834644 | 0.006297 | 0.016223 | 0.834644 | 0.003746 | 0.014831 | 0.08999 | 0.034269 | Modern | Nature |
When you are not surprised, not surprised,
nor leap in imagination from sunlight into shadow
or from shadow into sunlight
suiting the color of fright or delight
to the bewildering circumstance
when you are no longer surprised
by the quiet or fury of daybreak
the stormy uprush of the sun’s rage
over the edges of torn trees
torrents of living and dying flung
upward and outward inward and downward to space
or else
peace peace peace peace
the wood-thrush speaking his holy holy
far hidden in the forest of the mind
while slowly
the limbs of light unwind
and the world’s surface dreams again of night
as the center dreams of light
when you are not surprised
by breath and breath and breath
the first unconscious morning breath
the tap of the bird’s beak on the pane
and do not cry out come again
blest blest that you are come again
o light o sound o voice of bird o light
and memory too o memory blest
and curst with the debts of yesterday
that would not stay, or stay
when you are not surprised
by death and death and death
death of the bee in the daffodil
death of color in the child’s cheek
on the young mother’s breast
death of sense of touch of sight
death of delight
and the inward death the inward turning night
when the heart hardens itself with hate | 2 | fear | 0.621892 | 0.048409 | 0.00208 | 0.621892 | 0.013355 | 0.012061 | 0.019718 | 0.282485 | Modern | Nature |
At five I wake, rise, rub on the smoking pane
A port to see—water breathing in the air,
Boughs broken. The sun comes up in a golden stain,
Floats like a glassy sea-fruit. There is mist everywhere,
White and humid, and the Harbour is like plated stone,
Dull flakes of ice. One light drips out alone,
One bead of winter-red, smouldering in the steam,
Quietly over the roof-tops—another window
Touched with a crystal fire in the sun’s gullies,
One lonely star of the morning, where no stars gleam.
Far away on the rim of this great misty cup,
The sun gilds the dead suburbs as he rises up,
Diamonds the wind-cocks, makes glitter the crusted spikes
On moss-drowned gables. Now the tiles drip scarlet-wet,
Swim like birds’ paving-stones, and sunlight strikes
Their watery mirrors with a moister rivulet,
Acid and cold. Here lie those mummied Kings,
Men sleeping in houses, embalmed in stony coffins,
Till the Last Trumpet calls their galleries up,
And the suburbs rise with distant murmurings.
O buried dolls, O men sleeping invisible there,
I stare above your mounds of stone, lean down,
Marooned and lonely in this bitter air,
And in one moment deny your frozen town,
Renounce your bodies—earth falls in clouds away,
Stones lose their meaning, substance is lost in clay,
Roofs fade, and that small smo | 1 | disgust | 0.360009 | 0.348468 | 0.360009 | 0.058602 | 0.002464 | 0.086368 | 0.127702 | 0.016387 | Modern | Nature |
Even iron can put forth,
Even iron.
This is the iron age,
But let us take heart
Seeing iron break and bud,
Seeing rusty iron puff with clouds of blossom.
The almond-tree,
December's bare iron hooks sticking out of earth.
The almond-tree,
That knows the deadliest poison, like a snake
In supreme bitterness.
Upon the iron, and upon the steel,
Odd flakes as if of snow, odd bits of snow,
Odd crumbs of melting snow.
But you mistake, it is not from the sky;
From out the iron, and from out the steel,
Flying not down from heaven, but storming up,
Strange storming up from the dense under-earth
Along the iron, to the living steel
In rose-hot tips, and flakes of rose-pale snow
Setting supreme annunciation to the world.
Nay, what a heart of delicate super-faith,
Iron-breaking,
The rusty swords of almond-trees.
Trees suffer, like races, down the long ages.
They wander and are exiled, they live in exile through long ages
Like drawn blades never sheathed, hacked and gone black,
The alien trees in alien lands: and yet
The heart of blossom,
The unquenchable heart of blossom!
Look at the many-cicatrised frail vine, none more scarred and frail,
Yet see him fling himself abroad in fresh abandon
From the small wound-stump.
Even the wilful, obstinate, | 0 | anger | 0.490713 | 0.490713 | 0.30694 | 0.092107 | 0.001558 | 0.03398 | 0.069326 | 0.005375 | Modern | Nature |
I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.
It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee. | 1 | disgust | 0.778512 | 0.046889 | 0.778512 | 0.057457 | 0.002597 | 0.064349 | 0.034139 | 0.016057 | Modern | Nature |
A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,
Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,
Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown—
A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.
*
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs,
Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,
Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind—
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs.
*
A poem should be equal to:
Not true.
For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.
For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—
A poem should not mean
But be. | 2 | fear | 0.44356 | 0.036961 | 0.057355 | 0.44356 | 0.009243 | 0.036823 | 0.408913 | 0.007146 | Modern | Nature |
At evening, sitting on this terrace,
When the sun from the west, beyond Pisa, beyond the mountains of Carrara
Departs, and the world is taken by surprise ...
When the tired flower of Florence is in gloom beneath the glowing
Brown hills surrounding ...
When under the arches of the Ponte Vecchio
A green light enters against stream, flush from the west,
Against the current of obscure Arno ...
Look up, and you see things flying
Between the day and the night;
Swallows with spools of dark thread sewing the shadows together.
A circle swoop, and a quick parabola under the bridge arches
Where light pushes through;
A sudden turning upon itself of a thing in the air.
A dip to the water.
And you think:
"The swallows are flying so late!"
Swallows?
Dark air-life looping
Yet missing the pure loop ...
A twitch, a twitter, an elastic shudder in flight
And serrated wings against the sky,
Like a glove, a black glove thrown up at the light,
And falling back.
Never swallows!
Bats!
The swallows are gone.
At a wavering instant the swallows gave way to bats
By the Ponte Vecchio ...
Changing guard.
Bats, and an uneasy creeping in one's scalp
As the bats swoop overhead!
Flying madly.
Pipistrello!
Black piper on an infinitesimal pipe.
Little lumps th | 2 | fear | 0.748925 | 0.015395 | 0.009532 | 0.748925 | 0.002711 | 0.019418 | 0.023882 | 0.180135 | Modern | Nature |
Then you shall see her truly--your blood remembering its first invasion of her secrecy, its first encounters with her kind, her chieftain lover...his shade that haunts the lakes and hills | 4 | neutral | 0.565421 | 0.058417 | 0.220263 | 0.096464 | 0.00726 | 0.565421 | 0.027713 | 0.024463 | Modern | Nature |
I
The bronze General Grant riding a bronze horse in Lincoln Park
Shrivels in the sun by day when the motor cars whirr by in long processions going somewhere to keep apppointment for dinner and matinees and buying and selling
Though in the dusk and nightfall when high waves are piling
On the slabs of the promenade along the lake shore near by
I have seen the general dare the combers come closer
And make to ride his bronze horse out into the hoofs and guns of the storm.
II
I cross Lincoln Park on a winter night when the snow is falling.
Lincoln in bronze stands among the white lines of snow, his bronze forehead meeting soft echoes of the newsies crying forty thousand men are dead along the Yser, his bronze ears listening to the mumbled roar of the city at his bronze feet.
A lithe Indian on a bronze pony, Shakespeare seated with long legs in bronze, Garibaldi in a bronze cape, they hold places in the cold, lonely snow to-night on their pedestals and so they will hold them past midnight and into the dawn. | 2 | fear | 0.886328 | 0.024446 | 0.002736 | 0.886328 | 0.006085 | 0.014106 | 0.057101 | 0.009198 | Modern | Nature |
Man, the egregious egoist,
(In mystery the twig is bent,)
Imagines, by some mental twist,
That he alone is sentient
Of the intolerable load
Which on all living creatures lies,
Nor stoops to pity in the toad
The speechless sorrow of its eyes.
He asks no questions of the snake,
Nor plumbs the phosphorescent gloom
Where lidless fishes, broad awake,
Swim staring at a night-mare doom. | 5 | sadness | 0.913042 | 0.00521 | 0.029682 | 0.011717 | 0.001734 | 0.035253 | 0.913042 | 0.003363 | Modern | Nature |
Not in that wasted garden
Where bodies are drawn into grass
That feeds no flocks, and into evergreens
That bear no fruit
There where along the shaded walks
Vain sighs are heard,
And vainer dreams are dreamed
Of close communion with departed souls
But here under the apple tree
I loved and watched and pruned
With gnarled hands
In the long, long years;
Here under the roots of this northern-spy
To move in the chemic change and circle of life,
Into the soil and into the flesh of the tree,
And into the living epitaphs
Of redder apples! | 5 | sadness | 0.893047 | 0.02005 | 0.013104 | 0.029799 | 0.007479 | 0.018948 | 0.893047 | 0.017573 | Modern | Nature |
What large, dark hands are those at the window
Lifted, grasping the golden light
Which weaves its way through the creeper leaves
To my heart's delight?
Ah, only the leaves! But in the west,
In the west I see a redness come
Over the evening's burning breast
'Tis the wound of love goes home!
The woodbine creeps abroad
Calling low to her lover:
The sun-lit flirt who all the day
Has poised above her lips in play
And stolen kisses, shallow and gay
Of pollen, now has gone away
She woos the moth with her sweet, low word,
And when above her his broad wings hover
Then her bright breast she will uncover
And yield her honey-drop to her lover.
Into the yellow, evening glow
Saunters a man from the farm below,
Leans, and looks in at the low-built shed
Where hangs the swallow's marriage bed.
The bird lies warm against the wall.
She glances quick her startled eyes
Towards him, then she turns away
Her small head, making warm display
Of red upon the throat. His terrors sway
Her out of the nest's warm, busy ball,
Whose plaintive cry is heard as she flies
In one blue stoop from out the sties
Into the evening's empty hall.
Oh, water-hen, beside the rushes
Hide your quaint, unfading blushes,
Still your quick tail, and lie as dead,
Till the dis | 2 | fear | 0.497308 | 0.07516 | 0.020989 | 0.497308 | 0.021578 | 0.046999 | 0.194332 | 0.143632 | Modern | Nature |
I met a man in South Street, tall –
a nervous shark tooth swung on his chain.
His eyes pressed through green glass
- green glasses, or bar lights made them
so –
shine –
GREEN –
eyes –
stepped out – forgot to look at you
or left you several blocks away –
in the nickel-in-the-slot piano jogged
‘Stamboul Nights’ – weaving somebody’s nickel-sang-
O Stamboul Rose – dreams weave the rose!
Murmurs of Leviathan he spoke,
and rum was Plato in our heads…
‘‘It’s S.S. Ala – Antwerp – now remember kid
to put me out at three she sails on time.
I’m not much good at time any more keep
weakeyed watches sometimes snooze-’’ his bony hands
got to beating time… ‘‘A whaler once-
I ought to keep time and get over it-I’m a
Democrat-I know what time it is-No
I don’t want to know what time it is-that
damned white Arctic killed my time…’’
O Stamboul Rose-drums weave-
‘‘I ran a donkey engine down there on the Canal
in Panama-got tired of that-
then Yucatan selling kitchenware-beads-
have you seen Popocatepetl-birdless mouth
with ashes sifting down-?
and then the coast again… | 2 | fear | 0.683277 | 0.018023 | 0.004637 | 0.683277 | 0.042214 | 0.054516 | 0.052868 | 0.144465 | Modern | Nature |
See, the grass is full of stars,
Fallen in their brightness;
Hearts they have of shining gold,
Rays of shining whiteness.
Buttercups have honeyed hearts,
Bees they love the clover,
But I love the daisies' dance
All the meadow over.
Blow, O blow, you happy winds,
Singing summer's praises,
Up the field and down the field
A-dancing with the daisies. | 3 | joy | 0.674175 | 0.006545 | 0.004975 | 0.001542 | 0.674175 | 0.175003 | 0.105028 | 0.032732 | Modern | Nature |
First there is the wind but not like the familiar wind but long and without lapses or falling away or surges of air as is usual but rather like the persistent pressure of a river or a running tide.
This wind is from the other side and has an odor unlike the odor of the winds with us but like time if time had odor and were cold and carried a bitter and sharp taste like rust on the taste of snow or the fragrance of thunder.
When the air has this taste of time the frontiers are not far from us.
Then too there are the animals. There are always animals under the small trees. They belong neither to our side nor to theirs but are wild and because they are animals of such kind that wildness is unfamiliar in them as the horse for example or the goat and often sheep and dogs and like creatures their wandering there is strange and even terrifying signaling as it does the violation of custom and the subversion of order.
There are also the unnatural lovers the distortion of images the penetration of mirrors and the inarticulate meanings of the dreams. The dreams are in turmoil like a squall of birds.
Finally there is the evasion of those with whom we have come. It is at the frontiers that the companions desert us—that the girl returns to the old country
that we are alo | 1 | disgust | 0.580664 | 0.059381 | 0.580664 | 0.210884 | 0.001607 | 0.115486 | 0.021417 | 0.010561 | Modern | Nature |
I’ the how-dumb-deid o’ the cauld hairst nicht
The warl’ like an eemis stane
Wags i’ the lift;
An’ my eerie memories fa’
Like a yowdendrift.
Like a yowdendrift so’s I couldna read
The words cut oot i’ the stane
Had the fug o’ fame
An’ history’s hazelraw
No’ yirdit thaim. | 2 | fear | 0.942867 | 0.003038 | 0.00447 | 0.942867 | 0.003608 | 0.00823 | 0.008179 | 0.029607 | Modern | Nature |
This spring as it comes bursts up in bonfires green,
Wild puffing of emerald trees, and flame-filled bushes,
Thorn-blossom lifting in wreaths of smoke between
Where the wood fumes up and the watery, flickering rushes.
I am amazed at this spring, this conflagration
Of green fires lit on the soil of the earth, this blaze
Of growing, and sparks that puff in wild gyration,
Faces of people streaming across my gaze.
And I, what fountain of fire am I among
This leaping combustion of spring? My spirit is tossed
About like a shadow buffeted in the throng
Of flames, a shadow that's gone astray, and is lost. | 6 | surprise | 0.947293 | 0.015762 | 0.007304 | 0.014322 | 0.001573 | 0.011779 | 0.001968 | 0.947293 | Modern | Nature |
I never knew the earth had so much gold
The fields run over with it, and this hill
Hoary and old,
Is young with buoyant blooms that flame and thrill.
Such golden fires, such yellowlo, how good
This spendthrift world, and what a lavish God!
This fringe of wood,
Blazing with buttercup and goldenrod.
You too, beloved, are changed. Again I see
Your face grow mystical, as on that night
You turned to me,
And all the trembling worldand youwere white.
Aye, you are touched; your singing lips grow dumb;
The fields absorb you, color you entire . . .
And you become
A goddess standing in a world of fire! | 2 | fear | 0.928782 | 0.005734 | 0.002861 | 0.928782 | 0.013451 | 0.010293 | 0.01213 | 0.026749 | Modern | Nature |
The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on. | 2 | fear | 0.477684 | 0.018586 | 0.048803 | 0.477684 | 0.006319 | 0.265937 | 0.124281 | 0.058389 | Modern | Nature |
When she rises in the morning
I linger to watch her;
She spreads the bath-cloth underneath the window
And the sunbeams catch her
Glistening white on the shoulders,
While down her sides the mellow
Golden shadow glows as
She stoops to the sponge, and her swung breasts
Sway like full-blown yellow
Gloire de Dijon roses.
She drips herself with water, and her shoulders
Glisten as silver, they crumple up
Like wet and falling roses, and I listen
For the sluicing of their rain-dishevelled petals.
In the window full of sunlight
Concentrates her golden shadow
Fold on fold, until it glows as
Mellow as the glory roses. | 4 | neutral | 0.667257 | 0.016757 | 0.127679 | 0.013051 | 0.034739 | 0.667257 | 0.120462 | 0.020055 | Modern | Nature |
Pray why are you so bare, so bare,
Oh, bough of the old oak-tree;
And why, when I go through the shade you throw,
Runs a shudder over me?
My leaves were green as the best, I trow,
And sap ran free in my veins,
But I say in the moonlight dim and weird
A guiltless victim's pains.
I bent me down to hear his sigh;
I shook with his gurgling moan,
And I trembled sore when they rode away,
And left him here alone.
They'd charged him with the old, old crime,
And set him fast in jail:
Oh, why does the dog howl all night long,
And why does the night wind wail?
He prayed his prayer and he swore his oath,
And he raised his hand to the sky;
But the beat of hoofs smote on his ear,
And the steady tread drew nigh.
Who is it rides by night, by night,
Over the moonlit road?
And what is the spur that keeps the pace,
What is the galling goad?
And now they beat at the prison door,
"Ho, keeper, do not stay!
We are friends of him whom you hold within,
And we fain would take him away
"From those who ride fast on our heels
With mind to do him wrong;
They have no care for his innocence,
And the rope they bear is long."
They have fooled the jailer with lying words,
They have fooled the man with lies;
The bol | 2 | fear | 0.88727 | 0.004614 | 0.009855 | 0.88727 | 0.001902 | 0.007814 | 0.078682 | 0.009863 | Modern | Nature |
When I am dead and over me bright April
Shakes out her rain-drenched hair,
Tho' you should lean above me broken-hearted,
I shall not care.
I shall have peace, as leafy trees are peaceful
When rain bends down the bough,
And I shall be more silent and cold-hearted
Than you are now. | 5 | sadness | 0.968289 | 0.013953 | 0.005893 | 0.00173 | 0.001901 | 0.007434 | 0.968289 | 0.0008 | Modern | Nature |
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build 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 midnights all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnets 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 grey,
I hear it in the deep hearts core. | 5 | sadness | 0.763628 | 0.017124 | 0.017843 | 0.042706 | 0.019694 | 0.088339 | 0.763628 | 0.050667 | Modern | Nature |
These alternate nights and days, these seasons
Somehow fail to convince me. It seems
I have the sense of infinity!
(In your dreams, O crew of Columbus,
O listeners over the sea
For the surf that breaks upon Nothing—)
Once I was waked by the nightingales in the garden.
I thought, What time is it? I thought,
Time—Is it Time still?—Now is it Time?
(Tell me your dreams, O sailors:
Tell me, in sleep did you climb
The tall masts, and before you—)
At night the stillness of old trees
Is a leaning over and the inertness
Of hills is a kind of waiting.
(In sleep, in a dream, did you see
The world’s end? Did the water
Break—and no shore—Did you see?)
Strange faces come through the streets to me
Like messengers: and I have been warned
By the moving slowly of hands at a window.
Oh, I have the sense of infinity—
But the world, sailors, is round.
They say there is no end to it. | 2 | fear | 0.671023 | 0.027384 | 0.028466 | 0.671023 | 0.003522 | 0.063555 | 0.01427 | 0.191781 | Modern | Nature |
little tree
little silent Christmas tree
you are so little
you are more like a flower
who found you in the green forest
and were you very sorry to come away?
see i will comfort you
because you smell so sweetly
i will kiss your cool bark
and hug you safe and tight
just as your mother would,
only don't be afraid
look the spangles
that sleep all the year in a dark box
dreaming of being taken out and allowed to shine,
the balls the chains red and gold the fluffy threads,
put up your little arms
and i'll give them all to you to hold
every finger shall have its ring
and there won't be a single place dark or unhappy
then when you're quite dressed
you'll stand in the window for everyone to see
and how they'll stare!
oh but you'll be very proud
and my little sister and i will take hands
and looking up at our beautiful tree
we'll dance and sing
"Noel Noel" | 2 | fear | 0.647709 | 0.003797 | 0.001197 | 0.647709 | 0.070388 | 0.049456 | 0.191588 | 0.035865 | Modern | Nature |
A silver Lucifer
serves
cocaine in cornucopia
To some somnambulists
of adolescent thighs
draped
in satirical draperies
Peris in livery
prepare
Lethe
for posthumous parvenues
Delirious Avenues
lit
with the chandelier souls
of infusoria
from Pharoah’s tombstones
lead
to mercurial doomsdays
Odious oasis
in furrowed phosphorous
the eye-white sky-light
white-light district
of lunar lusts
Stellectric signs
“Wing shows on Starway”
“Zodiac carrousel”
Cyclones
of ecstatic dust
and ashes whirl
crusaders
from hallucinatory citadels
of shattered glass
into evacuate craters
A flock of dreams
browse on Necropolis
From the shores
of oval oceans
in the oxidized Orient
Onyx-eyed Odalisques
and ornithologists
observe
the flight
of Eros obsolete
And “Immortality”
mildews ...
in the museums of the moon
“Nocturnal cyclops”
“Crystal concubine”
Pocked with personification
the fossil virgin of the skies
waxes and wanes | 3 | joy | 0.70105 | 0.007844 | 0.002395 | 0.009095 | 0.70105 | 0.044551 | 0.216922 | 0.018143 | Modern | Nature |
Moonmoth and grasshopper that flee our page
And still wing on, untarnished of the name
We pinion to your bodies to assuage
Our envy of your freedomwe must maim
Because we are usurpers, and chagrined
And take the wing and scar it in the hand.
Names we have, even, to clap on the wind;
But we must die, as you, to understand.
I dreamed that all men dropped their names, and sang
As only they can praise, who build their days
With fin and hoof, with wing and sweetened fang
Struck free and holy in one Name always. | 0 | anger | 0.828753 | 0.828753 | 0.039913 | 0.011277 | 0.001998 | 0.057582 | 0.057115 | 0.003362 | Modern | Nature |
The tarantula rattling at the lily's foot,
Across the feet of the dead, laid in white sand
Near the coral beach; the small and ruddy crabs
Stilting out of sight, that reverse your name —
And above, the lyric palsy of eucalypti, seeping
A silver swash of something unvisited. . . . Suppose
I count these clean enamel frames of death,
Brutal necklaces of shells around each grave
Laid out so carefully. This pity can be told ...
And in the white sand I can find a name, albeit
In another tongue. Tree-name, flower-name deliberate,
Gainsay the unknown death. . . . The wind,
Sweeping the scrub palms, also is almost kind.
But who is a Captain of this doubloon isle
Without a turnstile? Nought but catchword crabs
Plaguing the hot groins of the underbrush? Who
The commissioner of mildew throughout the senses?
His Carib mathematics dull the bright new lenses.
Under the poinciana, of a noon or afternoon
Let fiery blossoms clot the light, render my ghost,
Sieved upward, black and white along the air —
Until it joins the blue's comedian host.
Let not the pilgrim see himself again
Bound like the dozen turtles on the wharf
Each twilight — still undead, and brine caked in their eyes,
— Huge, overturned: such thunder in their strain!
And clenched beaks coughing for the surge again!
Slagged of th | 1 | disgust | 0.527399 | 0.046276 | 0.527399 | 0.029015 | 0.00466 | 0.150208 | 0.224213 | 0.018228 | Modern | Nature |
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 | 2 | fear | 0.517352 | 0.0873 | 0.13089 | 0.517352 | 0.023937 | 0.104904 | 0.115863 | 0.019756 | Modern | Nature |
She has no need to fear the fall
Of harvest from the laddered reach
Of orchards, nor the tide gone ebbing
From the steep beach.
Nor hold to pain's effrontery
Her body's bulwark, stern and savage,
Nor be a glass, where to forsee
Another's ravage.
What she has gathered, and what lost,
She will not find to lose again.
She is possessed by time, who once
Was loved by men. | 2 | fear | 0.881715 | 0.049588 | 0.008512 | 0.881715 | 0.002776 | 0.007653 | 0.048283 | 0.001473 | Modern | Nature |
I
The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six oclock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
And then the lighting of the lamps.
II
The morning comes to consciousness
Of faint stale smells of beer
From the sawdust-trampled street
With all its muddy feet that press
To early coffee-stands.
With the other masquerades
That time resumes,
One thinks of all the hands
That are raising dingy shades
In a thousand furnished rooms.
III
You tossed a blanket from the bed,
You lay upon your back, and waited;
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling.
And when all the world came back
And the light crept up between the shutters
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands;
Sitting along the beds edge, where
You curled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands.
IV
His soul str | 5 | sadness | 0.77985 | 0.011557 | 0.105377 | 0.046047 | 0.004318 | 0.036432 | 0.77985 | 0.01642 | Modern | Nature |
The willows carried a slow sound,
A sarabande the wind mowed on the mead.
I could never remember
That seething, steady leveling of the marshes
Till age had brought me to the sea.
Flags, weeds. And remembrance of steep alcoves
Where cypresses shared the noons
Tyranny; they drew me into hades almost.
And mammoth turtles climbing sulphur dreams
Yielded, while sun-silt rippled them
Asunder ...
How much I would have bartered! the black gorge
And all the singular nestings in the hills
Where beavers learn stitch and tooth.
The pond I entered once and quickly fled
I remember now its singing willow rim.
And finally, in that memory all things nurse;
After the city that I finally passed
With scalding unguents spread and smoking darts
The monsoon cut across the delta
At gulf gates ... There, beyond the dykes
I heard wind flaking sapphire, like this summer,
And willows could not hold more steady sound. | 2 | fear | 0.417329 | 0.053979 | 0.055736 | 0.417329 | 0.00442 | 0.051989 | 0.367113 | 0.049435 | Modern | Nature |
Twelve o'clock.
Along the reaches of the street
Held in a lunar synthesis,
Whispering lunar incantations
Dissolve the floors of memory
And all its clear relations,
Its divisions and precisions,
Every street lamp that I pass
Beats like a fatalistic drum,
And through the spaces of the dark
Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.
Half-past one,
The street lamp sputtered,
The street lamp muttered,
The street lamp said, "Regard that woman
Who hesitates towards you in the light of the door
Which opens on her like a grin.
You see the border of her dress
Is torn and stained with sand,
And you see the corner of her eye
Twists like a crooked pin."
The memory throws up high and dry
A crowd of twisted things;
A twisted branch upon the beach
Eaten smooth, and polished
As if the world gave up
The secret of its skeleton,
Stiff and white.
A broken spring in a factory yard,
Rust that clings to the form that the strength has left
Hard and curled and ready to snap.
Half-past two,
The street lamp said,
"Remark the cat which flattens itself in the gutter,
Slips out its tongue
And devours a morsel of rancid butter."
So the hand of a child, automatic,
Slipped out and pocketed a toy that was running along the quay.
I could see nothing b | 2 | fear | 0.601405 | 0.079357 | 0.096028 | 0.601405 | 0.004968 | 0.074685 | 0.097656 | 0.045901 | Modern | Nature |
Think of our blindness where the water burned!
Are we so certain that those wings, returned
And turning, we had half discerned
Before our dazzled eyes had surely seen
The bird aloft there, did not mean?—
Our hearts so seized upon the sign!
Think how we sailed up-wind, the brine
Tasting of daphne, the enormous wave
Thundering in the water cave—
Thunder in stone. And how we beached the skiff
And climbed the coral of that iron cliff
And found what only in our hearts we’d heard—
The silver screaming of that one, white bird:
The fabulous wings, the crimson beak
That opened, red as blood, to shriek
And clamor in that world of stone,
No voice to answer but its own.
What certainty, hidden in our hearts before,
Found in the bird its metaphor? | 2 | fear | 0.586251 | 0.366294 | 0.010682 | 0.586251 | 0.004085 | 0.009487 | 0.011867 | 0.011334 | Modern | Nature |
Out of the winds' and the waves' riot,
Out of the loud foam,
He has put in to a great quiet
And a still home.
Here he may lie at ease and wonder
Why the old ship waits,
And hark for the surge and the strong thunder
Of the full Straits,
And look for the fishing fleet at morning,
Shadows like lost souls,
Slide through the fog where the seal's warning
Betrays the shoals,
And watch for the deep-sea liner climbing
Out of the bright West,
With a salmon-sky and her wake shining
Like a tern's breast,
And never know he is done for ever
With the old sea's pride,
Borne from the fight and the full endeavour
On an ebb tide. | 2 | fear | 0.440003 | 0.009022 | 0.009912 | 0.440003 | 0.007034 | 0.162274 | 0.354637 | 0.017118 | Modern | Nature |
Maurice, weep not, I am not here under this pine tree.
The balmy air of spring whispers through the sweet grass,
The stars sparkle, the whippoorwill calls,
But thou grievest, while my soul lies rapturous
In the blest Nirvana of eternal light!
Go to the good heart that is my husband,
Who broods upon what he calls our guilty love: i
Tell him that my love for you, no less than my love for him
Wrought out my destiny i that through the flesh
I won spirit, and through spirit, peace.
There is no marriage in heaven,
But there is love. | 5 | sadness | 0.699833 | 0.026736 | 0.010556 | 0.021455 | 0.167742 | 0.067545 | 0.699833 | 0.006135 | Modern | Nature |
Stranger, you who hide my love
In the curved cheek of a smile
And sleep with her upon a tongue
Of soft lies that beguile,
Your paradisal ecstasy
Is justified is justified
By hunger of the beasts beneath
The overhanging cloud
Who to snatch quick pleasures run
Before their momentary sun
Be eclipsed by death.
Lightly, lightly from my sleep
She stole, our vows of dew to break
Upon a day of melting rain
Another love to take:
Her happy happy perfidy
Was justified was justified
Since compulsive needs of sense
Clamour to be satisfied
And she was never one to miss
Plausible happiness
Of a new experience.
I, who stand beneath a bitter
Blasted tree, with the green life
Of summer joy cut from my side
By that self-justifying knife,
In my exiled misery
Were justified were justified
If upon two lives I preyed
Or punished with my suicide,
Or murdered pity in my heart
Or two other lives did part
To make the world pay what I paid.
Oh, but supposing that I climb
Alone to a high room of clouds
Up a ladder of the time
And lie upon a bed alone
And tear a feather from a wing
And liste | 5 | sadness | 0.791266 | 0.031986 | 0.002648 | 0.021548 | 0.127392 | 0.014258 | 0.791266 | 0.010902 | Modern | Love |
Knowlt Hoheimer ran away to the war
The day before Curl Trenary
Swore out a warrant through Justice Arnett
For stealing hogs.
But that's not the reason he turned a soldier.
He caught me running with Lucius Atherton.
We quarreled and I told him never again
To cross my path.
Then he stole the hogs and went to the war
Back of every soldier is a woman. | 0 | anger | 0.676931 | 0.676931 | 0.148822 | 0.055663 | 0.00204 | 0.089893 | 0.021282 | 0.005369 | Modern | Love |
He protested all his life long
The newspapers lied about him villainously;
That he was not at fault for Minerva's fall,
But only tried to help her.
Poor soul so sunk in sin he could not see
That even trying to help her, as he called it,
He had broken the law human and divine.
Passers by, an ancient admonition to you:
If your ways would be ways of pleasantness,
And all your pathways peace,
Love God and keep his commandments. | 1 | disgust | 0.320766 | 0.201443 | 0.320766 | 0.01492 | 0.011752 | 0.146167 | 0.301114 | 0.003837 | Modern | Love |
How can I, that girl standing there,
My attention fix
On Roman or on Russian
Or on Spanish politics,
Yet here's a travelled man that knows
What he talks about,
And there's a politician
That has both read and thought,
And maybe what they say is true
Of war and war's alarms,
But O that I were young again
And held her in my arms. | 2 | fear | 0.356001 | 0.054711 | 0.047734 | 0.356001 | 0.003347 | 0.342851 | 0.04747 | 0.147885 | Modern | Love |
I
I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,
I sought it daily for six weeks or so.
Maybe at last being but a broken man
I must be satisfied with my heart, although
Winter and summer till old age began
My circus animals were all on show,
Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot,
Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.
II
What can I but enumerate old themes,
First that sea-rider Oisin led by the nose
Through three enchanted islands, allegorical dreams,
Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose,
Themes of the embittered heart, or so it seems,
That might adorn old songs or courtly shows;
But what cared I that set him on to ride,
I, starved for the bosom of his fairy bride.
And then a counter-truth filled out its play,
`The Countess Cathleen' was the name I gave it,
She, pity-crazed, had given her soul away
But masterful Heaven had intervened to save it.
I thought my dear must her own soul destroy
So did fanaticism and hate enslave it,
And this brought forth a dream and soon enough
This dream itself had all my thought and love.
And when the Fool and Blind Man stole the bread
Cuchulain fought the ungovernable sea;
Heart mysteries there, and yet when all is said
It was the dream itself enchanted me:
Character isolated by a deed
To engross the present and dominate memory.
Players an | 5 | sadness | 0.640564 | 0.192919 | 0.088774 | 0.014048 | 0.003594 | 0.050906 | 0.640564 | 0.009195 | Modern | Love |
Were you but lying cold and dead,
And lights were paling out of the West,
You would come hither, and bend your head,
And I would lay my head on your breast;
And you would murmur tender words,
Forgiving me, because you were dead:
Nor would you rise and hasten away,
Though you have the will of wild birds,
But know your hair was bound and wound
About the stars and moon and sun:
O would, beloved, that you lay
Under the dock-leaves in the ground,
While lights were paling one by one. | 5 | sadness | 0.695506 | 0.06729 | 0.056482 | 0.116874 | 0.020185 | 0.041172 | 0.695506 | 0.002491 | Modern | Love |
Never give all the heart, for love
Will hardly seem worth thinking of
To passionate women if it seem
Certain, and they never dream
That it fades out from kiss to kiss;
For everything thats lovely is
But a brief, dreamy, kind delight.
O never give the heart outright,
For they, for all smooth lips can say,
Have given their hearts up to the play.
And who could play it well enough
If deaf and dumb and blind with love?
He that made this knows all the cost,
For he gave all his heart and lost. | 3 | joy | 0.556614 | 0.007823 | 0.008432 | 0.010871 | 0.556614 | 0.161129 | 0.238932 | 0.016198 | Modern | Love |
Some may have blamed you that you took away
The verses that could move them on the day
When, the ears being deafened, the sight of the eyes blind
With lightning, you went from me, and I could find
Nothing to make a song about but kings,
Helmets, and swords, and half-forgotten things
That were like memories of youbut now
We'll out, for the world lives as long ago;
And while we're in our laughing, weeping fit,
Hurl helmets, crowns, and swords into the pit.
But, dear, cling close to me; since you were gone,
My barren thoughts have chilled me to the bone. | 5 | sadness | 0.837302 | 0.044078 | 0.022803 | 0.010076 | 0.008828 | 0.071488 | 0.837302 | 0.005426 | Modern | Love |
Shy one, shy one,
Shy one of my heart,
She moves in the firelight
Pensively apart.
She carries in the dishes,
And lays them in a row.
To an isle in the water
With her would I go.
She carries in the candles,
And lights the curtained room,
Shy in the doorway
And shy in the gloom;
And shy as a rabbit,
Helpful and shy.
To an isle in the water
With her would I fly. | 2 | fear | 0.900563 | 0.002431 | 0.011998 | 0.900563 | 0.003169 | 0.037786 | 0.039959 | 0.004094 | Modern | Love |
I feel the spring far off, far off,
The faint, far scent of bud and leaf
Oh, how can spring take heart to come
To a world in grief,
Deep grief?
The sun turns north, the days grow long,
Later the evening star grows bright
How can the daylight linger on
For men to fight,
Still fight?
The grass is waking in the ground,
Soon it will rise and blow in waves
How can it have the heart to sway
Over the graves,
New graves?
Under the boughs where lovers walked
The apple-blooms will shed their breath
But what of all the lovers now
Parted by Death,
Grey Death? | 5 | sadness | 0.9191 | 0.007386 | 0.002136 | 0.04177 | 0.005255 | 0.007454 | 0.9191 | 0.016898 | Modern | Love |
Lying in dug-outs, joking idly, wearily;
Watching the candle guttering in the draught;
Hearing the great shells go high over us, eerily
Singing; how often have I turned over, and laughed
With pity and pride, photographs of all colours,
All sizes, subjects: khaki brothers in France;
Or mother's faces worn with countless dolours;
Or girls whose eyes were challenging and must dance,
Though in a picture only, a common cheap
Ill-taken card; and childrenfrozen, some
(Babies) waiting on Dicky-bird to peep
Out of the handkerchief that is his home
(But he's so shy!). And some with bright looks, calling
Delight across the miles of land and sea,
That not the dread of barrage suddenly falling
Could quite blot outnot mud nor lethargy.
Smiles and triumphant careless laughter. O
The pain of them, wide Earth's most sacred things!
Lying in dug-outs, hearing the great shells slow
Sailing mile-high, the heart mounts higher and sings.
But onceO why did he keep that bitter token
Of a dead Love?that boy, who, suddenly moved,
Showed me, his eyes wet, his low talk broken,
A girl who better had not been beloved. | 2 | fear | 0.777554 | 0.004949 | 0.003056 | 0.777554 | 0.035071 | 0.009144 | 0.16458 | 0.005646 | Modern | Love |
Now that I know
That passion warms little
Of flesh in the mold,
And treasure is brittle,
Ill lie here and learn
How, over their ground,
Trees make a long shadow
And a light sound.
August 1922 | 0 | anger | 0.547374 | 0.547374 | 0.184214 | 0.085638 | 0.005092 | 0.086911 | 0.081182 | 0.00959 | Modern | Love |
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