Written by
Wallace Stevens |
Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill;
And that in autumn, when the grapes
Made sharp air sharper by their smell
These had a being, breathing frost;
And least will guess that with our bones
We left much more, left what still is
The look of things, left what we felt
At what we saw. The spring clouds blow
Above the shuttered mansion-house,
Beyond our gate and the windy sky
Cries out a literate despair.
We knew for long the mansion's look
And what we said of it became
A part of what it is . . . Children,
Still weaving budded aureoles,
Will speak our speech and never know,
Will say of the mansion that it seems
As if he that lived there left behind
A spirit storming in blank walls,
A dirty house in a gutted world,
A tatter of shadows peaked to white,
Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.
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Written by
Dorothy Parker |
If, with the literate, I am
Impelled to try an epigram,
I never seek to take the credit;
We all assume that Oscar said it.
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Written by
Barry Tebb |
I stood there in front of forty-five faces
The first day of term, not especially fancying
"Exercises in Mechanical Arithmetic" and so instead
I read a poem from Kirkup in Japan, about Nijinsky,
Hand-written on a fan of rice-paper.
Thirty years later, taking a Sri Lankan girl
In search of her first job around London schools,
A Head-of-English announced "You wouldn’t get away
With that now!" as though I had committed
A crime-against-society.
I remember sending the boys out to change for P.T.
While the girls changed in front of me,
Was it some kind of incipient voyeurism?
And Sheila, my genius-child-poet, about whom
Redgrove said, "Of course you are in love!"
Or was it the poetry, some kind of anarchy,
"He’s quite mad about it and teaches nothing else",
The barely literate student teacher said.
Wittgenstein alternated between junior school teaching
And philosophy
Leavis ranted but read poetry inspirationally;
Twenty years later a stranger on a bus tapped my shoulder,
"What you taught me at nine got me two O'Levels,
That was all I ever got."
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Written by
Heather McHugh |
The literate are ill-prepared for this
snap in the line of life:
the day turns a trick
of twisted tongues and is
untiable, the month by no mere root
moon-ridden, and the yearly eloquences yielding more
than summer's part of speech times four. We better learn
the buried meaning in the grave: here
all we see of its alphabet is tracks
of predators, all we know of its tense
the slow seconds and quick centuries
of sex. Unletter the past and then
the future comes to terms. One late fall day
I stumbled from the study and I found
the easy symbols of the living room revised:
my shocked senses flocked to the window's reference
where now all backyard attitudes were deep
in memory: the landscapes I had known too well-
the picnic table and the hoe, the tricycle, the stubborn
shrub-the homegrown syllables
of shapely living-all
lay sanded and camelled by foreign snow...
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