The rushing amorous contact high in space
together,
The clinching, interlocking claws, a living,
fierce, gyrating wheel,
Four beating wings, two beaks, a swirling mass
tight grappling,
In tumbling, turning, clustering hoops,
straight downward falling,
Till o'er the river poised, the twain yet one,
a moment's lull,
A motionless still balance in the air, then parting,
talons loosing,
Upward again on slow-firm pinions slanting,
their separate diverse flight,
She hers, he his, pursuing.
Walt Whitman, 1880
Next | TOC> Way Through Woods> Jeffers
Vulture
I had walked since dawn and lay down to rest
on a bare hillside
Above the ocean. I saw through half-shut eyelids
a vulture wheeling high up in heaven,
And presently it passed again, but lower and
nearer, its orbit narrowing, I understood then
That I was under inspection. I lay death-still and
heard the flight-feathers
Whistle above me and make their circle and
come nearer.
I could see the naked red head between the
great wings
Bear downward staring. I said, "My dear bird,
we are wasting time here.
These old bones will still work; they are not
for you." But how beautiful he'd looked,
gliding down
On those great sails; how beautiful he looked,
veering away in the sea-light over the
precipice. I tell you solemnly
That I was sorry to have disappointed him.
To be eaten by that beak and become part
of him, to share those wings and those eyes—
What a sublime end of one's body, what an
enskyment; what a life after death.
Robinson Jeffers, 1962
Next | TOC> Way Through Woods> Jeffers
Hurt Hawks
1
The broken pillar of the wing jags from the
clotted shoulder,
The wing trails like a banner in defeat,
No more to use the sky forever but live
with famine
And pain a few days: cat nor coyote
Will shorten the week of waiting for death,
there is game without talons.
He stands under the oak-bush and waits
The lame feet of salvation; at night he
remembers freedom
And flies in a dream, the dawns ruin it.
He is strong and pain is worse to the strong,
incapacity is worse.
The curs of the day come and torment him
At distance, no one but death the redeemer
will humble that head,
The intrepid readiness, the terrible eyes.
The wild God of the world is sometimes
merciful to those
That ask mercy, not often to the arrogant.
You do not know him, you communal people,
or you have forgotten him;
Intemperate and savage, the hawk
remembers him;
Beautiful and wild, the hawks, and men that
are dying, remember him.
2
I'd sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than
a hawk; but the great redtail
Had nothing left but unable misery
From the bone too shattered for mending,
the wing that trailed under his talons when
he moved.
We had fed him six weeks, I gave him freedom,
He wandered over the foreland hill and returned
in the evening, asking for death,
Not like a beggar, still eyed with the old
Implacable arrogance.
I gave him the lead gift in the twilight.
What fell was relaxed. Owl-downy, soft feminine
feathers; but what
Soared: the fierce rush: the night herons by the
flooded river cried fear at its rising
Before it was quite unsheathed from reality.
Robinson Jeffers, 1924
Next | TOC> Way Through Woods> Millay
God's World
O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!
Thy winds, thy wide gray skies!
Thy mists that roll and rise!
Thy woods, this autumn day, that ache and sag
And all but cry with color! That gaunt crag
To crush! To lift the lean of that black bluff!
World, World, I cannot get thee close enough!
But never knew I this:
Here such a passion is
As stretcheth me apart—Lord, I do fear
Thou'st made the world too beautiful this year;
My soul is all but out of me—let fall
No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.
Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1913
Next | TOC> Way Through Woods> Millay
Spring
To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of the crocus.
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and
strewing flowers.
Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1921
Next | TOC> Way Through Woods> Hopkins
Pied Beauty
Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-color as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout
that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow,
and plow;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle
and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle,
dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise Him.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1877
Next | TOC> Way Through Woods> Hopkins
Inversnaid
This darksome burn, horseback brown,
His rollrock highroad roaring down,
In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam
Flutes and low to the lake falls home.
A windpuff-bonnet of fáwn-fróth
Turns and twindles over the broth
Of a pool so pitchblack, féll-frówning,
It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.
Degged with dew, dappled with dew
Are the groins of the braes that the brook
treads through,
Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern,
And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1881
Next | TOC> Way Through Woods> Wilbur
Love Calls
Us to the Things of
This World
The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.
Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.
Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.
Now they are rising together in calm swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;
Now they are flying in place, conveying
The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now
of a sudden
They swoon down into so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
The soul shrinks
From all that it is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every blessed day,
And cries,
"Oh, let there be nothing on earth
but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven."
Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world's hunks and colors,
The soul descends once more in bitter love
To accept the waking body, saying now
In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,
"Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;
Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating
Of dark habits,
keeping their difficult balance."
Richard Wilbur, 1956
Next | TOC> Way Through Woods> Lowell A
Chinoiseries
REFLECTIONS
When I looked into your eyes,
I saw a garden
With peonies, and tinkling pagodas,
And round-arched bridges
Over still lakes.
A woman sat beside the water
In a rain-blue silken garment.
She reached through the water
To pluck the crimson peonies
Beneath the surface,
But as she grasped the stems,
They jarred and broke into
white-green ripples;
And as she drew out her hand,
The water-drops dripping from it
Stained her rain-blue dress like tears.
FALLING SNOW
The snow whispers about me,
And my wooden clogs
Leave holes behind me in the snow.
But no one will pass this way
Seeking my footsteps,
And when the temple bell rings again
They will be covered and gone.
HOAR-FROST
In the cloud-gray mornings
I heard the herons flying;
And when I came into my garden,
My silken outer garment
Trailed over withered leaves.
A dried leaf crumbles at a touch,
But I have seen many Autumns
With herons blowing like smoke
Across the sky.
Amy Lowell, 1919
Next | TOC> Way Through Woods> Thomas
Fern Hill
Now as I was young and easy
under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the
grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honored among wagons
I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had
the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.
And as I was green and carefree,
famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing
as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman
and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills
barked clear and cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.
All the sun long it was running,
it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes
from the chimneys, it was air
And playing, lovely and watery
And fire green as grass.
And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were
bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among
stables, the nightjars
Flying with the ricks, and the horses
Flashing into the dark.
And then to awake, and the farm,
like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back,
the cock on his shoulder: it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered again
And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the
birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place,
the spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.
And honored among foxes
and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds
and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways,
My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades,
that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few
and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace,
Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days,
that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft
by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever
fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy
in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
Dylan Thomas, 1945
Next | TOC> Way Through Woods> Wylie
Puritan Sonnet
from "Wild Peaches"
There's something in this richness that I hate.
I love the look, austere, immaculate,
Of landscapes drawn in pearly monotones.
There's something in my very blood that owns
Bare hills, cold silver on a sky of slate,
A thread of water, churned to milky spate
Streaming through slanted pastures fenced
with stones.
I love those skies, thin blue or snowy gray,
Those fields sparse-planted, rendering
meager sheaves;
That spring, briefer than apple-blossom's breath,
Summer, so much too beautiful to stay,
Swift autumn, like a bonfire of leaves,
And sleepy winter, like the sleep of death.
Elinor Wylie, 1921
Next | TOC> Way Through Woods> Sandburg
Fog
The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.
Carl Sandburg, 1916
Next | TOC> Way Through Woods> Shelley
The Waning Moon
And like a dying lady, lean and pale,
Who totters forth, wrapped in a gauzy veil,
Out of her chamber, led by the insane
And feeble wanderings of her fading brain,
The moon arose up in the murky East
A white and shapeless mass.
Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth,
And ever changing, like a joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?
Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1820
Next | TOC> What Lips My Lips> Yeats
Politics
In our time the destiny of man presents its meaning
in political terms.
—Thomas Mann
How can I, that girl standing there,
My attention fix
On Roman or on Russian
Or on Spanish politics?
Yet here's a traveled man that knows
What he talks about,
And there's a politician
That has 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!
William Butler Yeats, 1939
Next | TOC> What Lips My Lips> Roethke
I Knew a Woman
I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,
When small birds sighed, she would sigh
back at them;
Ah, when she moved, she moved
more ways than one:
The shapes a bright container can contain!
Of her choice virtues only gods should speak,
Or English poets who grew up on Greek
(I'd have them sing in chorus, cheek to cheek).
How well her wishes went! She stroked my chin,
She taught me Turn, and Counter-turn,
and Stand;
She taught me Touch, that undulant white skin;
I nibbled meekly from her proffered hand;