Poems

Doña Josefina Counsels Doña Conceptión Before Entering Sears

Conchita debemos to speak totalmente in English

cuando we go into Sears okay     Por qué

Porque didn’t you hear lo que pasó     It say

on the eleven o’clock news anoche que two robbers

My Last Duchess

That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,

Looking as if she were alive. I call

That piece a wonder, now; Frà Pandolf’s hands

They are hostile nations

1

In view of the fading animals

the proliferation of sewers and fears   

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

January, 1795

Pavement slipp’ry, people sneezing,

Lords in ermine, beggars freezing;

Titled gluttons dainties carving,

Dover Beach

The sea is calm tonight.

The tide is full, the moon lies fair

Upon the straits; on the French coast the light

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art —

Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night

And watching, with eternal lids apart,

To Helen

Helen, thy beauty is to me

Like those Nicéan barks of yore,

That gently, o’er a perfumed sea,

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?

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,

Hanging Fire

I am fourteen

and my skin has betrayed me

the boy I cannot live without

still sucks his thumb

in secret

how come my knees are

always so ashy

what if I die

before morning

She Walks in Beauty

She walks in beauty, like the night

Of cloudless climes and starry skies;

And all that’s best of dark and bright

Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802

Earth has not anything to show more fair:

Dull would he be of soul who could pass by

A sight so touching in its majesty:

The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter

After Li Po

While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead

I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.

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,

A Dream Within a Dream

Take this kiss upon the brow!

And, in parting from you now,

Thus much let me avow —

Annabel Lee

It was many and many a year ago,

In a kingdom by the sea,

That a maiden there lived whom you may know

Life in a Love

Escape me?

Never —

Beloved!

Theme for English B

The instructor said,

Go home and write

a page tonight.

And let that page come out of you —

Flaxman

We deemed the secret lost, the spirit gone,

Which spake in Greek simplicity of thought,

And in the forms of gods and heroes wrought

The Cold Green Element

At the end of the garden walk

the wind and its satellite wait for me;

their meaning I will not know

The Listeners

‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,

Knocking on the moonlit door;

And his horse in the silence champed the grasses

The Pulley

When God at first made man,

Having a glass of blessings standing by,

“Let us,” said he, “pour on him all we can.

Self-Portrait

He wants to be

a brutal old man,

an aggressive old man,

Old Ironsides

Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!

Long has it waved on high,

And many an eye has danced to see

My Grandmother’s Love Letters

There are no stars tonight

But those of memory.

Yet how much room for memory there is

La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

Alone and palely loitering?

The sedge has withered from the lake,

Oh, Hope! thou soother sweet of human woes

Oh, Hope! thou soother sweet of human woes!

How shall I lure thee to my haunts forlorn!

For me wilt thou renew the withered rose,

To Autumn

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

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

Great Intimacy

It is like an exquisite spider web, this world, but I

don't get trapped.

I have ceased to tie the strings of one shoe to

another in the morning,

A Satirical Elegy on the Death of a Late Famous General

His Grace! impossible! what dead!

Of old age too, and in his bed!

And could that mighty warrior fall?

In Flanders Fields

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row,

That mark our place; and in the sky

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things —

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

For rose-moles all in stipple…

Sonnet CXVI: Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Bilingual/Bilingüe

My father liked them separate, one there,

one here (allá y aquí), as if aware

that words might cut in two his daughter’s heart

(el corazón) and lock the alien part

Family Reunions

The other people quit their stone fields to come here.

They slip in from nights that even the snow abandons.

They leave ashes in their glasses

Not Waving But Drowning

Nobody heard him, the dead man,

But still he lay moaning:

I was much further out than you thought 

One Art

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

The Chimney Sweeper: When my mother died I was very young

When my mother died I was very young,

And my father sold me while yet my tongue

Could scarcely cry “‘weep! ‘weep! ‘weep! ‘weep!”