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side a:
1. 18 and Life
her friend takes her to
If this brain’s over-tempered
consider that the fire was want
and the hammers were fists.
We have each tried to read to him, with no success, except for James,
who read him all of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey in the
Cévennes
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,
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,
What horror to awake at night
and in the dimness see the light.
…
Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
Down from the purple mist of trees on the mountain,
lurching through forests of white spruce and cedar,
stumbling through tamarack swamps…
Thou poem of lost attention and half try,
do you fear more the inner world or outer?
I do…
“Hope” is the thing with feathers —
That perches in the soul —
And sings the tune without the words —
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
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,
There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
After Li Po
While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were — I have not seen
As others saw — I could not bring
‘O Jesus Christ! I’m hit,’ he said; and died.
Whether he vainly cursed, or prayed indeed,
The Bullets chirped — In vain! vain! vain!
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,
Before high-pilèd books, in charactery,
O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake,
Out through the fields and the woods
And over the walls I have wended;
I have climbed the hills of view
When I was fair and young, then favor graced me.
Of many was I sought their mistress for to be.
But I did scorn them all and answered them therefore:
I grieve and dare not show my discontent,
I love and yet am forced to seem to hate,
I do, yet dare not say I ever meant,
“A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes, —
This debt we pay to human guile;
Or, a vision in a dream. A Fragment.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
So, we’ll go no more a roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
Escape me?
Never —
Beloved!
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
A little black thing among the snow,
Crying “weep! ‘weep!” in notes of woe!
“Where are thy father and mother? say?”
Love in Fantastic Triumph sat,
Whilst Bleeding Hearts around him flowed,
For whom Fresh pains he did Create,
