SEE ALL TAGS & MOODS
At the end of the garden walk
the wind and its satellite wait for me;
their meaning I will not know
oh papa, to have you drift up, some part of you drift up through
water through
fresh water into the teal plate of sky soaking foothills, papa,
Rain at Muchalat, rain at Sooke,
And rain, they say, from Yale to Skeena,
And the skid-roads blind, and never a look
Cedar and jagged fir
uplift sharp barbs
against the gray
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…
At the beginning I noticed
the huge stones on my path
I knew instinctively
Wild Nights — Wild Nights!
Were I with thee
Wild Nights should be
More than a storey high and twice that long,
it looks igneous, the Buhler Versatile 2360,
possessed of the ecology of some …
Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid…
Hidden in wonder and snow, or sudden with summer,
This land stares at the sun in a huge silence
Endlessly repeating something we cannot…
In the onion, there’s
something of fire. That fire known as
Fog. The onion is the way
Sent to the ice after white coats,
rough outfit slung on coiled rope belts,
they stooped to the slaughter: gaffed pups,
I was ready for a new experience.
All the old ones had burned out.
They lay in little ashy heaps along the roadside
About me the night moonless wimples the mountains
wraps ocean land …
Hello, listen, I’m on a field phone, do not speak until I say “over.”
Repeat, don’t talk until I say “over.” Over. Do you understand,
1
In view of the fading animals
the proliferation of sewers and fears
like the beginnings — o odales o adagios — of islands
from under the clouds where I write the first poem
its brown warmth now that we recognize them
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; —
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
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:
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
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
A march in the ranks hard-prest, and the road unknown,
A route through a heavy wood with muffled steps in the darkness,
Our army foil’d with loss severe, and the sullen remnant retreating,
Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;
Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk;
Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font.
Life has loveliness to sell,
All beautiful and splendid things,
Blue waves whitened on a cliff,
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said — “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert.... Near them, on the sand,
There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
A high bare field, brown from the plough, and borne
Aslant from sunset; amber wastes of sky
Washing the ridge; a clamour…
Happy the man, whose wish and care
A few paternal acres bound,
Content to breathe his native air,
Out of the deep and the dark,
A sparkling mystery, a shape,
Something perfect,
A moment the wild swallows like a flight
Of withered gust-caught leaves, serenely high,
Toss in the windrack up the muttering sky.
What if the sun comes out
And the new furrows do not look smeared?
This is April, and the sumach candles
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art —
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
A thin wet sky, that yellows at the rim,
And meets with sun-lost lip the marsh’s brim.
The pools low lying, dank with moss and mould,
I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling…
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
Fair tree! for thy delightful shade
’Tis just that some return be made;
Sure some return is due from me
Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,
Arrives the snow, and, driving o’er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air
A startled stag, the blue-grey Night,
Leaps down beyond black pines.
Behind — a length of yellow light —
Or, a vision in a dream. A Fragment.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
The sun goes down, and over all
These barren reaches by the tide
Such unelusive glories fall,
Lord of my heart’s elation,
Spirit of things unseen,
Be thou my aspiration
On Turning up in Her Nest with the Plough, November, 1785
Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim’rous beastie,
O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
Shall earth no more inspire thee,
Thou lonely dreamer now?
Since passion may not fire thee
Ah! why, because the dazzling sun
Restored my earth to joy
Have you departed, every one,
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Love in Fantastic Triumph sat,
Whilst Bleeding Hearts around him flowed,
For whom Fresh pains he did Create,
