The Giant Book of Poetry
William H. Roetzheim, Editor
Copyright acknowledgements for poems contained in this work are contained in the acknowledgement section at the end of this work, which shall be considered an extension of this copyright page.
The special contents of this edition
are Copyright © 2006 by William H. Roetzheim
This book was illustrated by
William H. Roetzheim
The author would like to thank Chris McDonald for assistance researching author dates of birth and Marshall Harvey for help with copyediting the manuscript.
Published by Level Four Press, 13518 Jamul Drive,
Jamul, CA 91935-1635 USA.
www.Level4Press.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The Giant Book of Poetry
edited by William H. Roetzheim
p. cm.
1. Poetry 2. English poetry. 3. American Poetry. I. Roetzheim, William H.
Library of Congress Control Number:2005903197
This book is printed on acid-neutral archival Quality paper.
Printed and bound in the Canada.
Dedication
To my wife Marianne—
our relationship is the poetry that matters.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Introduction
Level Four Poetry Manifesto
Organization of the Poems
A Note on Meter
A Request for Understanding and Assistance
Poems
Unknown (possibly 4,000 BC)
Ishtar
Archilochos (circa 700 BC – 650 BC)
Will, lost in a sea of trouble
The Bible
Address of Ruth to Naomi
Mei Sheng (Circe 140 BC)
The Beautiful Toilet
Horace (65 BC – 8 BC)
The young bloods come less often now
Norse Myth (circa 50 BC)
from The Longbeards’ Saga
Petronius Arbiter (27 AD – 66 AD)
Doing, a filthy pleasure is, and short
Tao Yuan-ming (To-Em-Mei) (365-427)
The Unmoving Cloud
Li Po (701 – 762)
The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter
Omar Khayam (1044-1123)
XI
XXIII
XXVIII
LI
Moritake (1452 – 1540)
One fallen flower
Sir Philip Sidney (1554 – 1586)
A Ditty
Be Your Words Made, Good Sir of Indian Ware
Loving in Truth
To Sleep
Robert Greene (1560 – 1592)
Content
Michael Drayton (1563-1631)
Love’s Farewell
William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
All the World’s a Stage
Sonnet XVII
Sonnet XVIII
Sonnet XXXII
Sonnet LV
Sonnet CXXX
Sonnet CXXXVIII
Sonnet CXLIII
Sonnet CXLVII
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
Thomas Campion (1567 – 1619)
Integer Vitae
Sir Henry Wotton (1568 – 1639)
Upon the Death of Sir Albert Morton′s Wife
John Donne (1572-1631)
Community
Confined Love
Death
The Computation
The Curse
William Drummond (1585 – 1649)
Life
Robert Herrick (1591 – 1674)
To the Virgins
Upon Julia’s Clothes
Thomas Carew (1595 – 1639)
Ingrateful Beauty Threatened
John Milton (1608 – 1674)
On His Blindness
Sir John Suckling (1609 – 1642)
Song: Why so pale and wan, fond lover?
Abraham Cowley (1618 – 1667)
Drinking
Richard Lovelace (1618 – 1658)
To Lucasta, On Going to the Wars
William Walsh (1663 – 1708)
Love and Jealousy
William Congreve (1670 – 1729)
False though she be to me and love
Ryusui (1691 – 1758)
A lost child crying
Jokun (circa 1700)
Ah! I intended
William Blake (1757 - 1827)
The Garden of Love
The Sick Rose
The Tiger
To See a World in a Grain of Sand
Robert Burns (1759 1796)
Epitaph for James Smith
Epitaph on a Henpecked SQuire
Epitaph on William Muir
Inconstancy in love
To A Louse
To A Mountain Daisy
William Wordsworth (1770 – 1850)
I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud
Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room
The Solitary Reaper
We are Seven
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 – 1834)
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
After Blenheim
The Scholar
Walter Savage Landor (1775 – 1864)
On His Seventy-Fifth Birthday
Well I Remember
Thomas Moore (1779 – 1852)
An Argument
‘Tis the Last Rose of Summer
George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788 – 1824)
She Walks in Beauty
So, we’ll go no more a-roving
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 – 1822)
Music
Mutability
Song from Charles the First
Ozymandias
John Clare (1793 – 1864)
Badger
William Cullen Bryant (1794 – 1878)
A Presentiment
Mutation
Thanatopsis
The Hurricane
The Murdered Traveler
The Poet
The Strange Lady
To a Waterfowl
John Keats (1795 – 1821)
Isabella
La Belle Dame Sans Merci
O Blush Not So
This living hand, now warm and capable 1
Ode on a Grecian Urn
Thomas Hood (1799 – 1845)
The Poet’s Fate
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882)
Days
Hamatreya
The Rhodora
The Snow-Storm
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806 – 1861)
Sonnets from the Portuguese – I
Sonnets from the Portuguese – XIV
Sonnets from the Portuguese – XX
Sonnets from the Portuguese – XLIII
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807 – 1882)
A Nameless Grave
Jugurtha
Killed at the Ford
King Witlaf’s Drinking-Horn
Nature
The Beleaguered City
The Fire of Drift-Wood
The Landlord’s Tale
The Phantom Ship
The Potter’s Wheel
The Rainy Day
The Three Silences of Molinos
Travels by the Fireside
Twilight
John Greenleaf Whittier (1807 – 1892)
Autumn Thoughts
By their Works
Forgiveness
Trust
Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809 – 1894)
Sun and Shadow
Edgar Allan Poe (1809 – 1849)
Annabel Lee
For Annie
The Raven
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809 – 1892)
Come Not, When I am Dead
Home They Brought Her Warrior Dead
The Charge of the Light Brigade
Vivien’s Song
Robert Browning (1812 – 1889)
A Toccata of Galuppi’s
Meeting at Night
My Last Duchess
Never the Time and the Place
Porphyria’s Lover
The Confessional
The Pied Piper of Hamelin
Edward Lear (1812 – 1888)
The Owl and the Pussy-Cat
Emily Bronte (1818 – 1848)
I am the Only Being Whose Doom
Charles Kingsley (1819 – 1875)
Young and Old
Walt Whitman (1819 – 1892)
Darest Thou Now O Soul
I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing
My Legacy
O Captain! My Captain
Song of Prudence
This Compost
When I heard the Learn’d Astronomer
Charles Baudelaire (1821 – 1867)
A Carrion
from Fuses I – on Love
from Fuses I – on Art
from Fuses I – on God
Heautontimoroumenos
Metamorphoses of the Vampire
Spleen
The Flask
The Ghostly Visitant
The Murderer’s Wine
The Pit
The Vampire
Coventry Patmore (1823 – 1896)
The Toys
Richard Henry Stoddard (1805 – 1923)
The Jar
Emily Dickinson (1830 – 1886)
A deed knocks first at thought
A narrow fellow in the grass
A word is dead
After great pain a formal feeling comes
Apparently with no surprise
Because I could not stop for death
Hope is the thing with feathers
I felt a funeral in my brain
I had been hungry all the years
I heard a fly buzz when I died
I taste a liQuor never brewed
I’m nobody! Who are you?
I’ve Known a Heaven, Like a Tent
My life closed twice before its close
The Last Night
The Props Assist the House
The way I read a letter’s this
There came a wind like a bugle
There’s a certain slant of light
To make a prairie it takes a clover
We Grow Accustomed to the Dark
Wild nights! Wild nights!
Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830 – 1894)
Goblin Market
Remember
Song
The First Day
Lewis Carroll (1832 – 1898)
The Walrus and the Carpenter
Thomas Hardy (1840 – 1928)
Channel firing
I look into my glass
The oxen
The Ruined Maid
Sidney Lanier (1842 – 1881)
The Revenge of Hamish
The Waving of the Corn
To Nannette Falk-Auerbach
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844 – 1889)
Binsey Poplars
Carrion Comfort
Spring and Fall
The Windhover
Edward Rowland Sill (1847 – 1881)
Five Lives
William Ernest Henley (1849 – 1903)
Invictus
Eugene Field (1850 – 1895)
Little Boy Blue
Wynken, Blynken, and Nod
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850 – 1894)
Requiem
Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850 – 1919)
Solitude
A.E. Housman (1859 – 1936)
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Terence, This is Stupid Stuff
They say my Verse is Sad: No Wonder
To an Athlete Dying Young
James B Naylor (1860 – 1902)
Authorship
Charles Perkins Stetson (1860 – 1935)
An Obstacle
Black Elk (1863 – 1950)
Everything the Power of the World Does is done in a circle
Rudyard Kipling (1865 – 1930)
If
The Way Through the Woods
We and They
William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939)
A Dream of Death
Politics
The Ballad of Father Gilligan
The Indian upon God
The Sad Shepherd
Shiki (Masaoka Tseunenori) (1867 – 1902)
By that fallen house
Edgar Lee Masters (1868 – 1950)
Alexander Throckmorton
Aner Clute
Conrad Siever
Fiddler Jones
Silas Dement
Tom Beatty
Roka (1868 – 1927)
Winter rain deepens
Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869 – 1935)
Amaryllis
An Old Story
Haunted House
John Evereldown
Karma
Mr. Flood's Party
Reuben Bright
Richard Cory
Souvenir
Supremacy
The Dead Village
The Growth of “Lorraine”
The Mill
The Pity of the Leaves
The Sheaves
The Tavern
Stephen Crane (1871 – 1900)
In the desert
W.H. Davies (1871 – 1940)
Leisure
Robert Frost (1874 – 1963)
“Out, Out—”
A Brook in the City
A Dream Pang
A Fountain, a Bottle, a Donkey's Ears, and Some Books
A Late Walk
After Apple-Picking
An Old Man’s Winter Night
Birches
Death of the Hired Man
Fire and Ice
For Once, Then, Something
Good-by and Keep Cold
Home Burial
In a Disused Graveyard
Into My Own
Mending Wall
Misgiving
On a Tree Fallen Across the Road
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Storm Fear
The Aim was Song
The Need of Being Versed in Country Things
The Onset
The Road Not Taken
The Vantage Point
The Wood-Pile
Amy Lowell (1874 – 1925)
A Decade
New Heavens for Old
Patterns
Robert Service (1874 – 1958)
Just Think!
Lost
My Madonna
On the Wire
The Ballad of Pious Pete
The Ballad of the Black Fox Skin
The Cremation of Sam McGee
The Shooting of Dan McGrew
The Smoking Frog
The Soldier of Fortune
The Wee Shop
Gertrude Stein (1874 – 1946)
from Idem the Same, A Valentine to Sherwood Anderson, A Very Valentine
Carl Sandburg (1878 – 1967)
Last Answers
The Junk Man
To Know Silence Perfectly
Vachel Lindsay (1879 – 1931)
The Horrid Voice of Science
Wallace Stevens (1879 – 1955)
The Snow Man
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
Marjorie Allen Seiffert (1881 – 1968)
Cubist Portrait
William Carlos Williams (1883 – 1963)
Danse Russe
The Act
The Last Words of My
English Grandmother
The Red Wheelbarrow
The Three Graces
To Mark Anthony in Heaven
This is Just to Say
Tract
Sara Teasdale (1884 – 1933)
There will come soft rains
D.H. Lawrence (1885 – 1930)
From The Ship of Death
New Year’s Eve
Snake
Ezra Pound (1885 – 1972)
A Pact
Francesca
In a Station of the Metro
Lustra (from the Introduction)
Tame Cat
Salutation
The Eyes
The Garden
The Plunge
The Tree
Louis Untermeyer (1885 – 1972)
Long Feud
Rupert Brooke (1887 – 1915)
The Soldier
Robinson Jeffers (1887 – 1962)
Fawn’s Foster-Mother
Joyce Kilmer (1887 – 1918)
Trees
Marianne Moore (1887 – 1972)
I May, I Might, I Must
Injudicious Gardening
Poetry
To a Steam Roller
T.S. Eliot (1888 – 1965)
Rhapsody on a Windy Night
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Hysteria
Anna Akhmatova (1889 – 1966)
ReQuiem – Instead of a Preface
Archibald MacLeish (1892 – 1982)
Ars Poetica
Not Marble nor the Gilded Monuments
Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892 – 1950)
First Fig
Wilfred Owen (1893 – 1918)
Dulce et Decorum Est
Lucian Blaga (1895 – 1961)
I will not crush the world’s corolla of wonders
Miyazawa Kenji (1896 – 1933)
Daydreaming on the Trail
Louise Bogan (1897 – 1970)
from Beginning and End—Knowledge
Ernest Hemingway (1899 – 1960)
from Wanderings — Chapter Heading
Wen I-to (1899 – 1946)
Dead Water
Anonymous
The Anvil—God’s Word
Langston Hughes (1902 – 1967)
Dream Deferred: Harlem
Evil
Maybe
Suicide’s Note
Stevie Smith (1902 – 1983)
Not Waving but Drowning
Sunt Leones
W.H. Auden (1907 – 1973)
Dichtung and Wahrheit
From Selected Shorts
Marginalia (Extracts)
Zawgee (1907 – 1973)
The Way of the Water-Hyacinth
Elizabeth Bishop (1911 – 1979)
Filling Station
In the Waiting Room
One Art
Sestina
The Armadillo
May Swenson (1913 – 1989)
A Couple
David Ignatow (1914 – 1997)
The Bagel
Randall Jarrell (1914 – 1965)
Bats
Next Day
The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
William Stafford (1914 – 1993)
Traveling Through the Dark
Dylan Thomas (1914 – 1953)
Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night
Robert Lax (1915 – 2000)
Alley Violinist
Gwendolyn Brooks (1917 – 2000)