Animal poems
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The Four Zoas (excerpt)
© William Blake
1.1 "What is the price of Experience? do men buy it for a song?
1.2 Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No, it is bought with the price
1.3 Of all that a man hath, his house, his wife, his children.
1.4 Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy,
1.5 And in the wither'd field where the farmer plows for bread in vain.
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
© William Blake
Rintrah roars & shakes his fires in the burdend air;
Hungry clouds swag on the deep
For The One Who Would Not Take His Life In His Hands
© Delmore Schwartz
Athlete, virtuoso,
Training for happiness,
Bend arm and knee, and seek
The body's sharp distress,
Apollo Musagete, Poetry, And The Leader Of The Muses
© Delmore Schwartz
O the endless fecundity of poetry is equaled
By its endless inexhaustible freshness, as in the discovery
of America and of poetry.
What Is To Be Given
© Delmore Schwartz
What is to be given,
Is spirit, yet animal,
Colored, like heaven,
Blue, yellow, beautiful.
Yeats Died Saturday In France
© Delmore Schwartz
Yeats died Saturday in France.
Freedom from his animal
Has come at last in alien Nice,
His heart beat separate from his will:
He knows at last the old abyss
Which always faced his staring face.
O Love, Sweet Animal
© Delmore Schwartz
O Love, dark animal,
With your strangeness go
Like any freak or clown:
Appease tee child in her
The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me
© Delmore Schwartz
"the withness of the body" --Whitehead
The heavy bear who goes with me,
A manifold honey to smear his face,
Clumsy and lumbering here and there,
Albert and the Lion
© Marriott Edgar
There's a famous seaside place called Blackpool,
That's noted for fresh air and fun,
And Mr and Mrs Ramsbottom
Went there with young Albert, their son.
Ghoti
© Heather McHugh
The gh comes from rough, the o from women's,
and the ti from unmentionables--presto:
there's the perfect English instance of
unlovablility--complete
Whenever I Go There
© William Stanley Merwin
In new rocks new insects are sitting
With the lights off
And once more I remember that the beginning
Green Fields
© William Stanley Merwin
By this part of the century few are left who believe
in the animals for they are not there in the carved parts
of them served on plates and the pleas from the slatted trucks
are sounds of shadows that possess no future
The Speed Of Light
© William Stanley Merwin
So gradual in those summers was the going
of the age it seemed that the long days setting out
when the stars faded over the mountains were not
leaving us even as the birds woke in full song and the dew
Modern Love XXX: What Are We First
© George Meredith
What are we first? First, animals; and next
Intelligences at a leap; on whom
Pale lies the distant shadow of the tomb,
And all that draweth on the tomb for text.
Sleeping On The Ceiling
© Elizabeth Bishop
It is so peaceful on the ceiling!
It is the Place de la Concorde.
The little crystal chandelier
is off, the fountain is in the dark.
Not a soul is in the park.
The Monument
© Elizabeth Bishop
Now can you see the monument? It is of wood
built somewhat like a box. No. Built
like several boxes in descending sizes
one above the other.
Large Bad Picture
© Elizabeth Bishop
Remembering the Strait of Belle Isle or
some northerly harbor of Labrador,
before he became a schoolteacher
a great-uncle painted a big picture.
Gentleman Alone
© Pablo Neruda
The young maricones and the horny muchachas,
The big fat widows delirious from insomnia,
Exiles
© Marilyn Hacker
Her brown falcon perches above the sink
as steaming water forks over my hands.
Below the wrists they shrivel and turn pink.
I am in exile in my own land.
The White Cliffs
© Alice Duer Miller
Yet I have loathed those voices when the sense
Of what they said seemed to me insolence,
As if the dominance of the whole nation
Lay in that clear correct enunciation.
