And at last, my all-time favorite. Blake was a genius (and a Sagittarius, to boot). His "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" is a pure literary masterpiece. "Songs of Innocence" are anything but. Yeats owes a great debt to this William.

I Heard an Angel
William Blake

I heard an Angel singing
When the day was springing,
"Mercy, Pity, Peace
Is the world's ( Read more... )

Emily! Such a wild girl in sheep's clothing.

Wild Nights
Emily Dickinson

Wild Nights! Wild Nights!
Were I with thee,
Wild Nights should be
Our luxury!

Futile the winds
To a heart in port,-
Done with the compass,
Done with the chart!

Rowing in Eden!
Ah! The sea!
Might I but moor
To-night in thee!

Another one from that supreme craftsman, W.B.

The Wheel
William Butler Yeats

Through winter-time we call on spring,
And through the spring on summer call,
And when abounding hedges ring
Declare that winter's best of all;
And after that there's nothing good
Because the spring-time has not come-
Nor know that what disturbs our blood
Is but its longing for the ( Read more... )

Gotta love Walt.

Song of Myself (excerpt)
Walt Whitman

5

Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat,
Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or
      lecture, not even the best,
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valvèd voice.

I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning,
How you settled your head athwart my hips and ( Read more... )

What We Want
Linda Pastan

What we want
is never simple.
We move among the things
we thought we wanted:
a face, a room, an open book
and these things bear our names--
now they want us.
But what we want appears
in dreams, wearing disguises.
We fall past,
holding out our arms
and in the morning
our arms ache.
We don't remember the dream,
but the dream remembers us.
It ( Read more... )

Philosphy in Warm Weather
Jane Kenyon

Now all the doors and windows
are open, and we move so easily
through the rooms. Cats roll
on the sunny rugs, and a clumsy wasp
climbs the pane, pausing
to rub a leg over her head.

All around physical life reconvenes.
The molecules of our bodies must love
to exist: they whirl in circles
and seem to begrudge us nothing.
( Read more... )

I Love the Way Men Crack
Ellen Bass

I love the way men crack 
open when their wives leave them,
their sheaths curling back like the split
shells of roasted chestnuts, exposing 
the sweet creamy meat. They call you
and unburden their hearts the way a woman
takes off her jewels, the heavy 
pendant earrings, the stiff lace gown and corset,
and slips into a ( Read more... )

Testament
Hayden Carruth

So often it has been displayed to us, the hourglass
with its grains of sand drifting down,
not as an object in our world
but as a sign, a symbol, our lives
drifting down grain by grain,
sifting away - I'm sure everyone must
see this emblem somewhere in the mind.
Yet not only our lives drift down. The stuff
of ego with which we began ( Read more... )

For Kicks.

Choosing a Dog
William Stafford

"It's love," they say. You touch
the right one and a whole half of the universe
wakes up, a new half.

Some people never find
that half, or they neglect it or trade it
for money or success and it dies.

The faces of big dogs tell, over the years,
that size is a burden: you enjoy it for awhile
but then maintenance gets ( Read more... )

Everything but God
Anne Pierson Wiese

In Europe you can see cathedrals
from far away. As you drive toward them
across the country they are visible-stony
and roosted on the land-even before the towns
that surround them. In New York you come
upon them with no warning, turn a corner
and there one is: on 5th Avenue St. Patrick's,
spiny and white as a shell in a ( Read more... )