Poems

The Men That Don’t Fit In

There’s a race of men that don’t fit in,

A race that can’t stay still;

So they break the hearts of kith and kin,

The Little Car

The 31st day of August 1914

I left Deauville a little before midnight

In Rouveyre’s little car

A Glass Tube Ecstasy

a glass tube

for my leg       says Hugo Ball

my hat a cylinder

Preludes

I

The winter evening settles down

With smell of steaks in passageways.

I’ve Dreamt of You So Often

I've dreamt of you so often that you become unreal.

Is there still time to reach this living body and to kiss on its mouth the birth of

the voice so dear to me?

The Fish

wade

through black jade.

   Of the crow-blue mussel shells, one keeps

Full Moon

My bands of silk and miniver

Momently grew heavier;

The black gauze was beggarly thin;

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

I’ve known rivers:

I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the

flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

The Passionate Shepherd to His Love

Come live with me and be my love,

And we will all the pleasures prove,

That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields,

Amor Mundi

“Oh where are you going with your love-locks flowing

On the west wind blowing along this valley track?”

“The downhill path is easy, come with me an it please ye,

Should Lanterns Shine

Should lanterns shine, the holy face,

Caught in an octagon of unaccustomed light,

Would wither up, an any boy of love

Kubla Khan

Or, a vision in a dream. A Fragment.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

Sometimes I Find Myself Weeping at the Oddest Moment

sometimes I find myself

weeping

at the oddest moment

The Poet

Out of the deep and the dark,

A sparkling mystery, a shape,

Something perfect,

La Figlia che Piange

O quam te memorem virgo...

Stand on the highest pavement of the stair —

Lean on a garden urn —

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

A Virginal

No, no! Go from me. I have left her lately.

I will not spoil my sheath with lesser brightness,

For my surrounding air hath a new lightness;

After Apple Picking

My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree

Toward heaven still,

And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill

The Maldive Shark

About the Shark, phlegmatical one,

Pale sot of the Maldive sea,

The sleek little pilot-fish, azure and slim,

When I Have Fears That I May Cease To Be

When I have fears that I may cease to be

Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,

Before high-pilèd books, in charactery,

Old Ironsides

Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!

Long has it waved on high,

And many an eye has danced to see

Sonnet XVIII: Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

grass

grass is unusual

it was invented by the Romans

unlike most people grass stays where it grows

if grass had gone to the moon it would be there today

because grass looks luxurious

people put it wherever they can

The Lonely Land

Cedar and jagged fir

uplift sharp barbs

against the gray

Come Up From the Fields Father

Come up from the fields father, here’s a letter from our Pete,

And come to the front door mother, here’s a letter from thy dear son.

Lo, ’tis autumn

From The Titanic: The Iceberg

Calved from a glacier near Godhaven coast,

It left the fiord for the sea — a host

Of white flotillas gathering in its wake,

Blow, blow, thou winter wind

Blow, blow, thou winter wind,

Thou art not so unkind

As man’s ingratitude;

Beat! Beat! Drums!

Beat! beat! drums! — blow! bugles! blow!

Through the windows — through doors — burst like a ruthless force,

Into the solemn church, and scatter the congregation,

The Bull Moose

Down from the purple mist of trees on the mountain,

lurching through forests of white spruce and cedar,

stumbling through tamarack swamps…

“Breathe dust…”

Breathe dust like you breathe wind so strong in your face

little grains of dirt which pock around the cheeks peddling

against a dust-storm…

Dulce et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

Among twenty snowy mountains,

The only moving thing

Was the eye of the blackbird.

Shall earth no more inspire thee

Shall earth no more inspire thee,

Thou lonely dreamer now?

Since passion may not fire thee

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,

And Mourners to and fro

Kept treading — treading — till it seemed

Père Lalement

I lift the Lord on high,

Under the murmuring hemlock boughs, and see

The small birds of the forest lingering by

The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd

If all the world and love were young,

And truth in every Shepherd’s tongue,

These pretty pleasures might me move,

Danse Russe

If I when my wife is sleeping

and the baby and Kathleen

are sleeping

Song to Celia

Drink to me only with thine eyes,

And I will pledge with mine;

Or leave a kiss but in the cup,

The Man He Killed

“Had he and I but met

By some old ancient inn,

We should have sat us down to wet