Chanson un peu naïve
by Louise Bogan (1967-1970)

What body can be ploughed,
Sown, and broken yearly?
She would not die, she vowed,
But she has, nearly.
         Sing, heart sing;
         Call and carol clearly.

And, since she could not die,
Care would be a feather,
A film over the eye
Of two that lie together.
         Fly, song, fly,
         Break your little tether.

So from strength concealed
She makes her pretty boast:
Plain is a furrow healed
And she may love you most.
         Cry, song, cry,
         And hear your crying lost.

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Soup
by Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)

I saw a famous man eating soup.
I say he was lifting a fat broth
Into his mouth with a spoon.
His name was in the newspapers that day
Spelled out in tall black headlines
And thousands of people were talking about him.

            When I saw him,
He sat bending his head over a plate
Putting soup in his mouth with a spoon.

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Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal
by Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)

    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:
The firefly wakens: waken thou with me.

    Now droops the milk-white peacock like a ghost,
And like a ghost she glimmers on to me.
    Now lies the Earth all Danaë to the stars,
And all thy heart lies open unto me.
    Now slides the silent meteor on, and leaves
A shining furrow, as thy thoughts in me.

    Now folds the lily all her sweetness up,
And slips into the bosom of the lake:
So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip
Into my bosom and be lost in me.

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Music I Heard
by Conrad Aiken (1889-1973)

Music I heard with you was more than music,
And bread I broke with you was more than bread.
Now that I am without you, all is desolate,
All that was once so beautiful is dead.

Your hands once touched this table and this silver,
And I have seen your fingers hold this glass.
These things do not remember you, beloved:
And yet your touch upon them will not pass.

For it was in my heart you moved among them,
And blessed them with your hands and with your eyes.
And in my heart they will remember always:
They knew you once, O beautiful and wise!

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To – –
by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

                              I
One word is too often profaned
      For me to profane it,
One feeling too falsely disdained
      For thee to disdain it;
One hope is too like despair
      For prudence to smother,
And pity from thee more dear
      Than that from another.

                              II
I can give not what men call love,
      But wilt thou accept not
The worship the heart lifts above
      And the Heavens reject not,—
The desire of the moth for the star,
      Of the night for the morrow,
The devotion to something afar
      From the sphere of our sorrow?

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The Fish
by Rupert Brooke (1887-1915)

In a cool curving world he lies
And ripples with dark ecstasies.
The kind luxurious lapse and steal
Shapes all his universe to feel
And know and be; the clinging stream
Closes his memory, glooms his dream,
Who lips the roots o’ the shore, and glides
Superb on unreturning tides.
Those silent waters weave for him
A fluctuant mutable world and dim,
Where wavering masses bulge and gape
Mysterious, and shape to shape
Dies momently through whorl and hollow,
And form and line and solid follow
Solid and line and form to dream
Fantastic down the eternal stream;
An obscure world, a shifting world,
Bulbous, or pulled to thin, or curled,
Or serpentine, or driving arrows,
Or serene slidings, or March narrows.
There slipping wave and shore are one,
And weed and mud. No ray of sun,
But glow to glow fades down the deep
(As dream to unknown dream in sleep);
Shaken translucency illumes
The hyaline of drifting glooms;
The strange soft-handed depth subdues
Drowned colour there, but black to hues,
As death to living, decomposes—
Red darkness of the heart of roses,
Blue brilliant from dead starless skies,
And gold that lies behind the eyes,
The unknown unnameable sightless white
That is the essential flame of night,
Lustreless purple, hooded green,
The myriad hues that He between
Darkness and darkness! . . .

                     And all’s one.
Gentle, embracing, quiet, dun,
The world he rests in, world he knows,
Perpetual curving. Only—grows
An eddy in that ordered falling,
A knowledge from the gloom, a calling
Weed in the wave, gleam in the mud—
The dark fire leaps along his blood;
Dateless and deathless, blind and still,
The intricate impulse works its will;
His woven world drops back; and he,
Sans providence, sans memory,
Unconscious and directly driven,
Fades to some dank sufficient heaven.

O world of lips, O world of laughter,
Where hope is fleet and thought flies after,
Of lights in the clear night, of cries
That drift along the wave and rise
Thin to the glittering stars above,
You know the hands, the eyes of love!
The strife of limbs, the sightless clinging,
The infinite distance, and the singing
Blown by the wind, a flame of sound,
The gleam, the flowers, and vast around
The horizon, and the heights above—
You know the sigh, the song of love!

But there the night is close, and there
Darkness is cold and strange and bare;
And the secret deeps are whisperless;
And rhythm is all deliciousness;
And joy is in the throbbing tide,
Whose intricate fingers beat and glide
In felt bewildering harmonies
Of trembling touch; and music is
The exquisite knocking of the blood.
Space is no more, under the mud;
His bliss is older than the sun.
Silent and straight the waters run.
The lights, the cries, the willows dim,
And the dark tide are one with him.

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