A small anthology for unhurried hours
Poems are instruments of attention. They ask us to look twice, listen longer, and make a little more room for wonder.
Four public-domain poems · Six luminous fragments · Three ways to notice
I · Hope
“Hope” is the thing with feathers —
That perches in the soul —
And sings the tune without the words —
And never stops — at all —
And sweetest — in the Gale — is heard —
And sore must be the storm —
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm —
I’ve heard it in the chillest land —
And on the strangest Sea —
Yet — never — in Extremity,
It asked a crumb — of me.
A hymn to the stubborn, wordless force that keeps singing through the hardest weather.
II · Continuance
Oh me! Oh life! of the questions of these recurring,
Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish,
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew’d,
Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me,
Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined,
The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?
Answer.
That you are here—that life exists and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.
The answer is not certainty. The answer is participation.
III · Steadfastness
Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—
No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death.
Not the star’s solitude, but its steadiness: permanence translated into a language for love.
A cabinet of small astonishments
Some lines behave like matches: brief in the hand, bright enough to change the room. Open each image to linger with one.
“The morn in russet mantle clad / Walks o’er the dew of yon high eastward hill.”
William Shakespeare
“The sea is calm tonight. / The tide is full, the moon lies fair.”
Matthew Arnold
“I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference.”
Robert Frost
“The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas.”
Alfred Noyes
“Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, / Old Time is still a-flying.”
Robert Herrick
“There is a crack in everything; that is how the morning enters.”
A note from this collection
Fieldwork for ordinary days
Poetry begins before the page. Try one of these small experiments and let the familiar world become strange again.
Choose one ordinary object. For two minutes, describe its shape, light, and texture without saying what it is.
Keep a list of sounds that have no convenient name: a radiator cooling, a coat sleeve brushing a wall, rain under a bridge.
Write one sentence that starts where certainty ends. Do not explain it. Let the sentence remain a door.
IV · Homecoming
Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
Go slowly. The world is still making itself visible.