PEOPLE'S CHOICE
SEE ALL TAGS & MOODS
wade
through black jade.
Of the crow-blue mussel shells, one keeps
I too, dislike it: there are things that are important
…
“Hope” is the thing with feathers —
That perches in the soul —
And sings the tune without the words —
My bands of silk and miniver
Momently grew heavier;
The black gauze was beggarly thin;
Laugh, and the world laughs with you;
Weep, and you weep alone;
For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,
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,
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
Beat! beat! drums! — blow! bugles! blow!
Through the windows — through doors — burst like a ruthless force,
Into the solemn church, and scatter the congregation,
A noiseless patient spider,
I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
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,
Life has loveliness to sell,
All beautiful and splendid things,
Blue waves whitened on a cliff,
I am the people — the mob — the crowd — the mass.
Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me?
I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the world’s food and clothes.
Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and…
They are all gone away,
The House is shut and still,
There is nothing more to say.
Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn,
Grew lean while he assailed the seasons;
He wept that he was ever born,
After Li Po
While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
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;
Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicéan barks of yore,
That gently, o’er a perfumed sea,
From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were — I have not seen
As others saw — I could not bring
It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow —
What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones,
The labor of an age in pilèd stones,
Or that his hallowed relics should be hid
I think I should have loved you presently,
And given in earnest words I flung in jest;
And lifted honest eyes for you to see,
About the Shark, phlegmatical one,
Pale sot of the Maldive sea,
The sleek little pilot-fish, azure and slim,
Mr. Kessler, you know, was in the army,
And he drew six dollars a month as a pension,
And stood on the corner talking politics,
The tide rises, the tide falls,
The twilight darkens, the curlew calls;
Along the sea-sands damp and brown
What the Heart of the Young Man Said to the Psalmist.
Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!
Long has it waved on high,
And many an eye has danced to see
We deemed the secret lost, the spirit gone,
Which spake in Greek simplicity of thought,
And in the forms of gods and heroes wrought
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
Out through the fields and the woods
And over the walls I have wended;
I have climbed the hills of view
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill
Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,
Arrives the snow, and, driving o’er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air
Give all to love;
Obey thy heart;
Friends, kindred, days,
The lords of life, the lords of life, —
I saw them pass,
In their own guise,
I
The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
“A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
O quam te memorem virgo...
Stand on the highest pavement of the stair —
Lean on a garden urn —
We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes, —
This debt we pay to human guile;
Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge
The dice of drowned men’s bones he saw bequeath
An embassy. Their numbers as he watched,
Thou ill-form’d offspring of my feeble brain,
Who after birth didst by my side remain,
Till snatched from thence by friends, less wise than true,
All things within this fading world hath end,
Adversity doth still our joyes attend;
No ties so strong, no friends so dear and sweet,
If ever two were one, then surely we.
If ever man were loved by wife, then thee.
If ever wife was happy in a man,
