Best Famous Carrier Poems

Here is a collection of the all-time best famous Carrier poems. This is a select list of the best famous Carrier poetry. Reading, writing, and enjoying famous Carrier poetry (as well as classical and contemporary poems) is a great past time. These top poems are the best examples of carrier poems.

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• All Famous Carrier Poems

Written by Vladimir Mayakovsky | At the Top of My voice My most respected comrades of posterity! Rummaging among these days’ petrified crap, exploring the twilight of our times, you, possibly, will inquire about me too. And, possibly, your scholars will declare, with their erudition overwhelming a swarm of problems; once there lived a certain champion of boiled water, and inveterate enemy of raw water. Professor, take off your bicycle glasses! I myself will expound those times and myself. I, a latrine cleaner and water carrier, by the revolution mobilized and drafted, went off to the front from the aristocratic gardens of poetry - the capricious wench She planted a delicious garden, the daughter, cottage, pond and meadow. Myself a garden I did plant, myself with water sprinkled it. some pour their verse from water cans; others spit water from their mouth - the curly Macks, the clever jacks - but what the hell’s it all about! There’s no damming al this up - beneath the walls they mandoline: “Tara-tina, tara-tine, tw-a-n-g. . . ” It’s no great honor, then, for my monuments to rise from such roses above the public squares, where consumption coughs, where whores, hooligans and syphilis walk. Agitprop sticks in my teeth too, and I’d rather compose romances for you - more profit in it and more charm. But I subdued myself, setting my heel on the throat of my own song. Listen, comrades of posterity, to the agitator the rabble-rouser. Stifling the torrents of poetry, I’ll skip the volumes of lyrics; as one alive, I’ll address the living. I’ll join you in the far communist future, I who am no Esenin super-hero. My verse will reach you across the peaks of ages, over the heads of governments and poets. My verse will reach you not as an arrow in a cupid-lyred chase, not as worn penny Reaches a numismatist, not as the light of dead stars reaches you. My verse by labor will break the mountain chain of years, and will present itself ponderous, crude, tangible, as an aqueduct, by slaves of Rome constructed, enters into our days. When in mounds of books, where verse lies buried, you discover by chance the iron filings of lines, touch them with respect, as you would some antique yet awesome weapon. It’s no habit of mine to caress the ear with words; a maiden’s ear curly-ringed will not crimson when flicked by smut. In parade deploying the armies of my pages, I shall inspect the regiments in line. Heavy as lead, my verses at attention stand, ready for death and for immortal fame. The poems are rigid, pressing muzzle to muzzle their gaping pointed titles. The favorite of all the armed forces the cavalry of witticisms ready to launch a wild hallooing charge, reins its chargers still, raising the pointed lances of the rhymes. and all these troops armed to the teeth, which have flashed by victoriously for twenty years, all these, to their very last page, I present to you, the planet’s proletarian. The enemy of the massed working class is my enemy too inveterate and of long standing. Years of trial and days of hunger ordered us to march under the red flag. We opened each volume of Marx as we would open the shutters in our own house; but we did not have to read to make up our minds which side to join, which side to fight on. Our dialectics were not learned from Hegel. In the roar of battle it erupted into verse, when, under fire, the bourgeois decamped as once we ourselves had fled from them. Let fame trudge after genius like an inconsolable widow to a funeral march - die then, my verse, die like a common soldier, like our men who nameless died attacking! I don’t care a spit for tons of bronze; I don’t care a spit for slimy marble. We’re men of kind, we’ll come to terms about our fame; let our common monument be socialism built in battle. Men of posterity examine the flotsam of dictionaries: out of Lethe will bob up the debris of such words as “prostitution,” “tuberculosis,” “blockade. ” For you, who are now healthy and agile, the poet with the rough tongue of his posters, has licked away consumptives’ spittle. With the tail of my years behind me, I begin to resemble those monsters, excavated dinosaurs. Comrade life, let us march faster, march faster through what’s left of the five-year plan. My verse has brought me no rubles to spare: no craftsmen have made mahogany chairs for my house. In all conscience, I need nothing except a freshly laundered shirt. When I appear before the CCC of the coming bright years, by way of my Bolshevik party card, I’ll raise above the heads of a gang of self-seeking poets and rogues, all the hundred volumes of my communist-committed books. Transcribed: by Mitch Abidor.

Written by Adrienne Rich | Shattered Head A life hauls itself uphill through hoar-mist steaming the sun's tongue licking leaf upon leaf into stricken liquid When? When? cry the soothseekers but time is a bloodshot eye seeing its last of beauty its own foreclosure a bloodshot mind finding itself unspeakable What is the last thought? Now I will let you know? or, Now I know? (porridge of skull-splinters, brain tissue mouth and throat membrane, cranial fluid) Shattered head on the breast of a wooded hill Laid down there endlessly so tendrils soaked into matted compose became a root torqued over the faint springhead groin whence illegible matter leaches: worm-borings, spurts of silt volumes of sporic changes hair long blown into far follicles blasted into a chosen place Revenge on the head (genitals, breast, untouched) revenge on the mouth packed with its inarticulate confessions revenge on the eyes green-gray and restless revenge on the big and searching lips the tender tongue revenge on the sensual, on the nose the carrier of history revenge on the life devoured in another incineration You can walk by such a place, the earth is made of them where the stretched tissue of a field or woods is humid with beloved matter the soothseekers have withdrawn you feel no ghost, only a sporic chorus when that place utters its worn sigh let us have peace And the shattered head answers back And I believed I was loved, I believed I loved Who did this to us?

Written by John Milton | Another On The Same Here lieth one who did most truly prove, That he could never die while he could move, So hung his destiny never to rot While he might still jogg on, and keep his trot, Made of sphear-metal, never to decay Untill his revolution was at stay. Time numbers motion, yet (without a crime 'Gainst old truth) motion number'd out his time: And like an Engin mov'd with wheel and waight, His principles being ceast, he ended strait. Rest that gives all men life, gave him his death, And too much breathing put him out of breath; Nor were it contradiction to affirm Too long vacation hastned on his term. Meerly to drive the time away he sickn'd, Fainted, and died, nor would with Ale be quickn'd; Nay, quoth he, on his swooning bed out-stretch'd, If I may not carry, sure Ile ne're be fetch'd, But vow though the cross Doctors all stood hearers, For one Carrier put down to make six bearers. Ease was his chief disease, and to judge right, He di'd for heavines that his Cart went light, His leasure told him that his time was com, And lack of load, made his life burdensom That even to his last breath (ther be that say't) As he were prest to death, he cry'd more waight; But had his doings lasted as they were, He had bin an immortall Carrier. Obedient to the Moon he spent his date In cours reciprocal, and had his fate Linkt to the mutual flowing of the Seas, Yet (strange to think) his wain was his increase: His Letters are deliver'd all and gon, Onely remains this superscription.

Written by Edgar Lee Masters | John Hancock Otis As to democracy, fellow citizens, Are you not prepared to admit That I, who inherited riches and was to the manor born, Was second to none in Spoon River In my devotion to the cause of Liberty? While my contemporary, Anthony Findlay, Born in a shanty and beginning life As a water carrier to the section hands, Then becoming a section hand when he was grown, Afterwards foreman of the gang, until he rose To the superintendency of the railroad, Living in Chicago, Was a veritable slave driver, Grinding the faces of labor, And a bitter enemy of democracy. And I say to you, Spoon River, And to you, O republic, Beware of the man who rises to power From one suspender.

Written by Carl Sandburg | Skyscraper BY day the skyscraper looms in the smoke and sun and has a soul. Prairie and valley, streets of the city, pour people into it and they mingle among its twenty floors and are poured out again back to the streets, prairies and valleys. It is the men and women, boys and girls so poured in and out all day that give the building a soul of dreams and thoughts and memories. (Dumped in the sea or fixed in a desert, who would care for the building or speak its name or ask a policeman the way to it?) Elevators slide on their cables and tubes catch letters and parcels and iron pipes carry gas and water in and sewage out. Wires climb with secrets, carry light and carry words, and tell terrors and profits and loves--curses of men grappling plans of business and questions of women in plots of love. Hour by hour the caissons reach down to the rock of the earth and hold the building to a turning planet. Hour by hour the girders play as ribs and reach out and hold together the stone walls and floors. Hour by hour the hand of the mason and the stuff of the mortar clinch the pieces and parts to the shape an architect voted. Hour by hour the sun and the rain, the air and the rust, and the press of time running into centuries, play on the building inside and out and use it. Men who sunk the pilings and mixed the mortar are laid in graves where the wind whistles a wild song without words And so are men who strung the wires and fixed the pipes and tubes and those who saw it rise floor by floor. Souls of them all are here, even the hod carrier begging at back doors hundreds of miles away and the brick- layer who went to state's prison for shooting another man while drunk. (One man fell from a girder and broke his neck at the end of a straight plunge--he is here--his soul has gone into the stones of the building. ) On the office doors from tier to tier--hundreds of names and each name standing for a face written across with a dead child, a passionate lover, a driving ambition for a million dollar business or a lobster's ease of life. Behind the signs on the doors they work and the walls tell nothing from room to room. Ten-dollar-a-week stenographers take letters from corporation officers, lawyers, efficiency engineers, and tons of letters go bundled from the building to all ends of the earth. Smiles and tears of each office girl go into the soul of the building just the same as the master-men who rule the building. Hands of clocks turn to noon hours and each floor empties its men and women who go away and eat and come back to work. Toward the end of the afternoon all work slackens and all jobs go slower as the people feel day closing on them. One by one the floors are emptied. . . The uniformed elevator men are gone. Pails clang. . . Scrubbers work, talking in foreign tongues. Broom and water and mop clean from the floors human dust and spit, and machine grime of the day. Spelled in electric fire on the roof are words telling miles of houses and people where to buy a thing for money. The sign speaks till midnight. Darkness on the hallways. Voices echo. Silence holds. . . Watchmen walk slow from floor to floor and try the doors. Revolvers bulge from their hip pockets. . . Steel safes stand in corners. Money is stacked in them. A young watchman leans at a window and sees the lights of barges butting their way across a harbor, nets of red and white lanterns in a railroad yard, and a span of glooms splashed with lines of white and blurs of crosses and clusters over the sleeping city. By night the skyscraper looms in the smoke and the stars and has a soul.

Written by Alfred Lord Tennyson | In Memoriam A. H. H. Strong Son of God, immortal Love, Whom we, that have not seen thy face, By faith, and faith alone, embrace, Believing where we cannot prove; Thine are these orbs of light and shade; Thou madest Life in man and brute; Thou madest Death; and lo, thy foot Is on the skull which thou hast made. Thou wilt not leave us in the dust: Thou madest man, he knows not why, He thinks he was not made to die; And thou hast made him: thou art just. Thou seemest human and divine, The highest, holiest manhood, thou. Our wills are ours, we know not how; Our wills are ours, to make them thine. Our little systems have their day; They have their day and cease to be: They are but broken lights of thee, And thou, O Lord, art more than they. We have but faith: we cannot know; For knowledge is of things we see And yet we trust it comes from thee, A beam in darkness: let it grow. Let knowledge grow from more to more, But more of reverence in us dwell; That mind and soul, according well, May make one music as before, But vaster. We are fools and slight; We mock thee when we do not fear: But help thy foolish ones to bear; Help thy vain worlds to bear thy light. Forgive what seem'd my sin in me; What seem'd my worth since I began; For merit lives from man to man, And not from man, O Lord, to thee. Forgive my grief for one removed, Thy creature, whom I found so fair. I trust he lives in thee, and there I find him worthier to be loved. Forgive these wild and wandering cries, Confusions of a wasted youth; Forgive them where they fail in truth, And in thy wisdom make me wise. I I held it truth, with him who sings To one clear harp in divers tones, That men may rise on stepping-stones Of their dead selves to higher things. But who shall so forecast the years And find in loss a gain to match? Or reach a hand thro' time to catch The far-off interest of tears? Let Love clasp Grief lest both be drown'd, Let darkness keep her raven gloss: Ah, sweeter to be drunk with loss, To dance with death, to beat the ground, Than that the victor Hours should scorn The long result of love, and boast, `Behold the man that loved and lost, But all he was is overworn.' II Old Yew, which graspest at the stones That name the under-lying dead, Thy fibres net the dreamless head, Thy roots are wrapt about the bones. The seasons bring the flower again, And bring the firstling to the flock; And in the dusk of thee, the clock Beats out the little lives of men. O, not for thee the glow, the bloom, Who changest not in any gale, Nor branding summer suns avail To touch thy thousand years of gloom: And gazing on thee, sullen tree, Sick for thy stubborn hardihood, I seem to fail from out my blood And grow incorporate into thee. III O Sorrow, cruel fellowship, O Priestess in the vaults of Death, O sweet and bitter in a breath, What whispers from thy lying lip? 'The stars,' she whispers, `blindly run; A web is wov'n across the sky; From out waste places comes a cry, And murmurs from the dying sun: 'And all the phantom, Nature, stands— With all the music in her tone, A hollow echo of my own,— A hollow form with empty hands.' And shall I take a thing so blind, Embrace her as my natural good; Or crush her, like a vice of blood, Upon the threshold of the mind? IV To Sleep I give my powers away; My will is bondsman to the dark; I sit within a helmless bark, And with my heart I muse and say: O heart, how fares it with thee now, That thou should'st fail from thy desire, Who scarcely darest to inquire, 'What is it makes me beat so low?' Something it is which thou hast lost, Some pleasure from thine early years. Break, thou deep vase of chilling tears, That grief hath shaken into frost! Such clouds of nameless trouble cross All night below the darken'd eyes; With morning wakes the will, and cries, 'Thou shalt not be the fool of loss.' V I sometimes hold it half a sin To put in words the grief I feel; For words, like Nature, half reveal And half conceal the Soul within. But, for the unquiet heart and brain, A use in measured language lies; The sad mechanic exercise, Like dull narcotics, numbing pain. In words, like weeds, I'll wrap me o'er, Like coarsest clothes against the cold: But that large grief which these enfold Is given in outline and no more. VI One writes, that `Other friends remain,' That `Loss is common to the race'— And common is the commonplace, And vacant chaff well meant for grain. That loss is common would not make My own less bitter, rather more: Too common! Never morning wore To evening, but some heart did break. O father, wheresoe'er thou be, Who pledgest now thy gallant son; A shot, ere half thy draught be done, Hath still'd the life that beat from thee. O mother, praying God will save Thy sailor,—while thy head is bow'd, His heavy-shotted hammock-shroud Drops in his vast and wandering grave. Ye know no more than I who wrought At that last hour to please him well; Who mused on all I had to tell, And something written, something thought; Expecting still his advent home; And ever met him on his way With wishes, thinking, `here to-day,' Or `here to-morrow will he come.' O somewhere, meek, unconscious dove, That sittest ranging golden hair; And glad to find thyself so fair, Poor child, that waitest for thy love! For now her father's chimney glows In expectation of a guest; And thinking `this will please him best,' She takes a riband or a rose; For he will see them on to-night; And with the thought her colour burns; And, having left the glass, she turns Once more to set a ringlet right; And, even when she turn'd, the curse Had fallen, and her future Lord Was drown'd in passing thro' the ford, Or kill'd in falling from his horse. O what to her shall be the end? And what to me remains of good? To her, perpetual maidenhood, And unto me no second friend. VII Dark house, by which once more I stand Here in the long unlovely street, Doors, where my heart was used to beat So quickly, waiting for a hand, A hand that can be clasp'd no more— Behold me, for I cannot sleep, And like a guilty thing I creep At earliest morning to the door. He is not here; but far away The noise of life begins again, And ghastly thro' the drizzling rain On the bald street breaks the blank day. VIII A happy lover who has come To look on her that loves him well, Who 'lights and rings the gateway bell, And learns her gone and far from home; He saddens, all the magic light Dies off at once from bower and hall, And all the place is dark, and all The chambers emptied of delight: So find I every pleasant spot In which we two were wont to meet, The field, the chamber, and the street, For all is dark where thou art not. Yet as that other, wandering there In those deserted walks, may find A flower beat with rain and wind, Which once she foster'd up with care; So seems it in my deep regret, O my forsaken heart, with thee And this poor flower of poesy Which little cared for fades not yet. But since it pleased a vanish'd eye, I go to plant it on his tomb, That if it can it there may bloom, Or, dying, there at least may die. IX Fair ship, that from the Italian shore Sailest the placid ocean-plains With my lost Arthur's loved remains, Spread thy full wings, and waft him o'er. So draw him home to those that mourn In vain; a favourable speed Ruffle thy mirror'd mast, and lead Thro' prosperous floods his holy urn. All night no ruder air perplex Thy sliding keel, till Phosphor, bright As our pure love, thro' early light Shall glimmer on the dewy decks. Sphere all your lights around, above; Sleep, gentle heavens, before the prow; Sleep, gentle winds, as he sleeps now, My friend, the brother of my love; My Arthur, whom I shall not see Till all my widow'd race be run; Dear as the mother to the son, More than my brothers are to me. X I hear the noise about thy keel; I hear the bell struck in the night: I see the cabin-window bright; I see the sailor at the wheel. Thou bring'st the sailor to his wife, And travell'd men from foreign lands; And letters unto trembling hands; And, thy dark freight, a vanish'd life. So bring him; we have idle dreams: This look of quiet flatters thus Our home-bred fancies. O to us, The fools of habit, sweeter seems To rest beneath the clover sod, That takes the sunshine and the rains, Or where the kneeling hamlet drains The chalice of the grapes of God; Than if with thee the roaring wells Should gulf him fathom-deep in brine; And hands so often clasp'd in mine, Should toss with tangle and with shells. XI Calm is the morn without a sound, Calm as to suit a calmer grief, And only thro' the faded leaf The chestnut pattering to the ground: Calm and deep peace on this high world, And on these dews that drench the furze, And all the silvery gossamers That twinkle into green and gold: Calm and still light on yon great plain That sweeps with all its autumn bowers, And crowded farms and lessening towers, To mingle with the bounding main: Calm and deep peace in this wide air, These leaves that redden to the fall; And in my heart, if calm at all, If any calm, a calm despair: Calm on the seas, and silver sleep, And waves that sway themselves in rest, And dead calm in that noble breast Which heaves but with the heaving deep. XII Lo, as a dove when up she springs To bear thro' Heaven a tale of woe, Some dolorous message knit below The wild pulsation of her wings; Like her I go; I cannot stay; I leave this mortal ark behind, A weight of nerves without a mind, And leave the cliffs, and haste away O'er ocean-mirrors rounded large, And reach the glow of southern skies, And see the sails at distance rise, And linger weeping on the marge, And saying; `Comes he thus, my friend? Is this the end of all my care?' And circle moaning in the air: 'Is this the end? Is this the end?' And forward dart again, and play About the prow, and back return To where the body sits, and learn That I have been an hour away. XIII Tears of the widower, when he sees A late-lost form that sleep reveals, And moves his doubtful arms, and feels Her place is empty, fall like these; Which weep a loss for ever new, A void where heart on heart reposed; And, where warm hands have prest and closed, Silence, till I be silent too. Which weep the comrade of my choice, An awful thought, a life removed, The human-hearted man I loved, A Spirit, not a breathing voice. Come, Time, and teach me, many years, I do not suffer in a dream; For now so strange do these things seem, Mine eyes have leisure for their tears; My fancies time to rise on wing, And glance about the approaching sails, As tho' they brought but merchants' bales, And not the burthen that they bring. XIV If one should bring me this report, That thou hadst touch'd the land to-day, And I went down unto the quay, And found thee lying in the port; And standing, muffled round with woe, Should see thy passengers in rank Come stepping lightly down the plank, And beckoning unto those they know; And if along with these should come The man I held as half-divine; Should strike a sudden hand in mine, And ask a thousand things of home; And I should tell him all my pain, And how my life had droop'd of late, And he should sorrow o'er my state And marvel what possess'd my brain; And I perceived no touch of change, No hint of death in all his frame, But found him all in all the same, I should not feel it to be strange. XV To-night the winds begin to rise And roar from yonder dropping day: The last red leaf is whirl'd away, The rooks are blown about the skies; The forest crack'd, the waters curl'd, The cattle huddled on the lea; And wildly dash'd on tower and tree The sunbeam strikes along the world: And but for fancies, which aver That all thy motions gently pass Athwart a plane of molten glass, I scarce could brook the strain and stir That makes the barren branches loud; And but for fear it is not so, The wild unrest that lives in woe Would dote and pore on yonder cloud That rises upward always higher, And onward drags a labouring breast, And topples round the dreary west, A looming bastion fringed with fire. XVI What words are these have falle'n from me? Can calm despair and wild unrest Be tenants of a single breast, Or sorrow such a changeling be? Or cloth she only seem to take The touch of change in calm or storm; But knows no more of transient form In her deep self, than some dead lake That holds the shadow of a lark Hung in the shadow of a heaven? Or has the shock, so harshly given, Confused me like the unhappy bark That strikes by night a craggy shelf, And staggers blindly ere she sink? And stunn'd me from my power to think And all my knowledge of myself; And made me that delirious man Whose fancy fuses old and new, And flashes into false and true, And mingles all without a plan? XVII Thou comest, much wept for: such a breeze Compell'd thy canvas, and my prayer Was as the whisper of an air To breathe thee over lonely seas. For I in spirit saw thee move Thro' circles of the bounding sky, Week after week: the days go by: Come quick, thou bringest all I love. Henceforth, wherever thou may'st roam, My blessing, like a line of light, Is on the waters day and night, And like a beacon guards thee home. So may whatever tempest mars Mid-ocean, spare thee, sacred bark; And balmy drops in summer dark Slide from the bosom of the stars. So kind an office hath been done, Such precious relics brought by thee; The dust of him I shall not see Till all my widow'd race be run. XVIII 'Tis well; 'tis something; we may stand Where he in English earth is laid, And from his ashes may be made The violet of his native land. 'Tis little; but it looks in truth As if the quiet bones were blest Among familiar names to rest And in the places of his youth. Come then, pure hands, and bear the head That sleeps or wears the mask of sleep, And come, whatever loves to weep, And hear the ritual of the dead. Ah yet, ev'n yet, if this might be, I, falling on his faithful heart, Would breathing thro' his lips impart The life that almost dies in me; That dies not, but endures with pain, And slowly forms the firmer mind, Treasuring the look it cannot find, The words that are not heard again. XIX The Danube to the Severn gave The darken'd heart that beat no more; They laid him by the pleasant shore, And in the hearing of the wave. There twice a day the Severn fills; The salt sea-water passes by, And hushes half the babbling Wye, And makes a silence in the hills. The Wye is hush'd nor moved along, And hush'd my deepest grief of all, When fill'd with tears that cannot fall, I brim with sorrow drowning song. The tide flows down, the wave again Is vocal in its wooded walls; My deeper anguish also falls, And I can speak a little then. XX The lesser griefs that may be said, That breathe a thousand tender vows, Are but as servants in a house Where lies the master newly dead; Who speak their feeling as it is, And weep the fulness from the mind: `It will be hard,' they say, `to find Another service such as this.' My lighter moods are like to these, That out of words a comfort win; But there are other griefs within, And tears that at their fountain freeze; For by the hearth the children sit Cold in that atmosphere of Death, And scarce endure to draw the breath, Or like to noiseless phantoms flit; But open converse is there none, So much the vital spirits sink To see the vacant chair, and think, 'How good! how kind! and he is gone.' XXI I sing to him that rests below, And, since the grasses round me wave, I take the grasses of the grave, And make them pipes whereon to blow. The traveller hears me now and then, And sometimes harshly will he speak: `This fellow would make weakness weak, And melt the waxen hearts of men.' Another answers, `Let him be, He loves to make parade of pain That with his piping he may gain The praise that comes to constancy.' A third is wroth: `Is this an hour For private sorrow's barren song, When more and more the people throng The chairs and thrones of civil power? 'A time to sicken and to swoon, When Science reaches forth her arms To feel from world to world, and charms Her secret from the latest moon?' Behold, ye speak an idle thing: Ye never knew the sacred dust: I do but sing because I must, And pipe but as the linnets sing: And one is glad; her note is gay, For now her little ones have ranged; And one is sad; her note is changed, Because her brood is stol'n away. XXII The path by which we twain did go, Which led by tracts that pleased us well, Thro' four sweet years arose and fell, From flower to flower, from snow to snow: And we with singing cheer'd the way, And, crown'd with all the season lent, From April on to April went, And glad at heart from May to May: But where the path we walk'd began To slant the fifth autumnal slope, As we descended following Hope, There sat the Shadow fear'd of man; Who broke our fair companionship, And spread his mantle dark and cold, And wrapt thee formless in the fold, And dull'd the murmur on thy lip, And bore thee where I could not see Nor follow, tho' I walk in haste, And think, that somewhere in the waste The Shadow sits and waits for me. XXIII Now, sometimes in my sorrow shut, Or breaking into song by fits, Alone, alone, to where he sits, The Shadow cloak'd from head to foot, Who keeps the keys of all the creeds, I wander, often falling lame, And looking back to whence I came, Or on to where the pathway leads; And crying, How changed from where it ran Thro' lands where not a leaf was dumb; But all the lavish hills would hum The murmur of a happy Pan: When each by turns was guide to each, And Fancy light from Fancy caught, And Thought leapt out to wed with Thought Ere Thought could wed itself with Speech; And all we met was fair and good, And all was good that Time could bring, And all the secret of the Spring Moved in the chambers of the blood; And many an old philosophy On Argive heights divinely sang, And round us all the thicket rang To many a flute of Arcady. XXIV And was the day of my delight As pure and perfect as I say? The very source and fount of Day Is dash'd with wandering isles of night. If all was good and fair we met, This earth had been the Paradise It never look'd to human eyes Since our first Sun arose and set. And is it that the haze of grief Makes former gladness loom so great? The lowness of the present state, That sets the past in this relief? Or that the past will always win A glory from its being far; And orb into the perfect star We saw not, when we moved therein? XXV I know that this was Life,—the track Whereon with equal feet we fared; And then, as now, the day prepared The daily burden for the back. But this it was that made me move As light as carrier-birds in air; I loved the weight I had to bear, Because it needed help of Love: Nor could I weary, heart or limb, When mighty Love would cleave in twain The lading of a single pain, And part it, giving half to him. XXVI Still onward winds the dreary way; I with it; for I long to prove No lapse of moons can canker Love, Whatever fickle tongues may say. And if that eye which watches guilt And goodness, and hath power to see Within the green the moulder'd tree, And towers fall'n as soon as built— Oh, if indeed that eye foresee Or see (in Him is no before) In more of life true life no more And Love the indifference to be, Then might I find, ere yet the morn Breaks hither over Indian seas, That Shadow waiting with the keys, To shroud me from my proper scorn. XXVII I envy not in any moods The captive void of noble rage, The linnet born within the cage, That never knew the summer woods: I envy not the beast that takes His license in the field of time, Unfetter'd by the sense of crime, To whom a conscience never wakes; Nor, what may count itself as blest, The heart that never plighted troth But stagnates in the weeds of sloth; Nor any want-begotten rest. I hold it true, whate'er befall; I feel it, when I sorrow most; 'Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all.

Written by Les Murray | A Retrospect Of Humidity All the air conditioners now slacken their hummed carrier wave. Once again we've served our three months with remissions in the steam and dry iron of this seaboard. In jellied glare, through the nettle-rash season we've watched the sky's fermenting laundry portend downpours. Some came, and steamed away, and we were clutched back into the rancid saline midnights of orifice weather, to damp grittiness and wiping off the air. Metaphors slump irritably together in the muggy weeks. Shark and jellyfish shallows become suburbs where you breathe a fat towel; babies burst like tomatoes with discomfort in the cotton-wrapped pointing street markets; the Lycra-bulging surf drips from non-swimmers miles from shore, and somehow includes soil. Skins, touching, soak each other. Skin touching any surface wets that and itself in a kind of mutual digestion. Throbbing heads grow lianas of nonsense. It's our annual visit to the latitudes of rice, kerosene and resignation, an averted, temporary visit unrelated, for most, to the attitudes of festive northbound jets gaining height - closer, for some few, to the memory of ulcers scraped with a tin spoon or sweated faces bowing before dry where the flesh is worn inside out, all the hunger-organs clutched in rank nylon, by those for whom exhaustion is spirit: an intrusive, heart-narrowing season at this far southern foot of the monsoon. As the kleenex flower, the hibiscus drops its browning wads, we forget annually, as one forgets a sickness. The stifling days will never come again, not now that we've seen the first sweater tugged down on the beauties of division and inside the rain's millions, a risen loaf of cat on a cool night verandah.

Written by Donald Hall | The Man In The Dead Machine High on a slope in New Guinea The Grumman Hellcat lodges among bright vines as thick as arms. In 1943, the clenched hand of a pilot glided it here where no one has ever been. In the cockpit, the helmeted skeleton sits upright, held by dry sinews at neck and shoulder, and webbing that straps the pelvic cross to the cracked leather of the seat, and the breastbone to the canvas cover of the parachute. Or say the shrapnel missed him, he flew back to the carrier, and every morning takes the train, his pale hands on the black case, and sits upright, held by the firm webbing.

Written by Anne Bradstreet | Another Phoebus make haste, the day's too long, be gone, The silent night's the fittest time for moan; But stay this once, unto my suit give ear, And tell my griefs in either hemisphere. (And if the whirling of thy wheels don't drown'd) The woeful accents of my doleful sound, If in thy swift carrier thou canst make stay, I crave this boon, this errand by the way, Commend me to the man more loved than life, Show him the sorrows of his widowed wife; My dumpish thoughts, my groans, my brakish tears My sobs, my longing hopes, my doubting fears, And if he love, how can he there abide? My interest's more than all the world beside. He that can tell the stars or ocean sand, Or all the grass that in the meads do stand, The leaves in th' woods, the hail, or drops of rain, Or in a corn-field number every grain, Or every mote that in the sunshine hops, May count my sighs, and number all my drops. Tell him the countless steps that thou dost trace, That once a day thy spouse thou may'st embrace; And when thou canst not treat by loving mouth, Thy rays afar salute her from the south. But for one month I see no day (poor soul) Like those far situate under the pole, Which day by day long wait for thy arise, O how they joy when thou dost light the skies. O Phoebus, hadst thou but thus long from thine Restrained the beams of thy beloved shine, At thy return, if so thou could'st or durst, Behold a Chaos blacker than the first. Tell him here's worse than a confused matter, His little world's a fathom under water. Nought but the fervor of his ardent beams Hath power to dry the torrent of these streams. Tell him I would say more, but cannot well, Oppressed minds abruptest tales do tell. Now post with double speed, mark what I say, By all our loves conjure him not to stay

Written by William Butler Yeats | Cuchulain Comforted A man that had six mortal wounds, a man Violent and famous, strode among the dead; Eyes stared out of the branches and were gone. Then certain Shrouds that muttered head to head Came and were gone. He leant upon a tree As though to meditate on wounds and blood. A Shroud that seemed to have authority Among those bird-like things came, and let fall A bundle of linen. Shrouds by two and thrce Came creeping up because the man was still. And thereupon that linen-carrier said: 'Your life can grow much sweeter if you will 'Obey our ancient rule and make a shroud; Mainly because of what we only know The rattle of those arms makes us afraid. 'We thread the needles' eyes, and all we do All must together do. ' That done, the man Took up the nearest and began to sew. 'Now must we sing and sing the best we can, But first you must be told our character: Convicted cowards all, by kindred slain 'Or driven from home and left to dic in fear. ' They sang, but had nor human tunes nor words, Though all was done in common as before; They had changed their thtoats and had the throats of birds.