A Summer Afternoon by James Whitcomb Riley

A languid atmosphere, a lazy breeze,
With labored respiration, moves the wheat
From distant reaches, till the golden seas
Break in crisp whispers at my feet.


My book, neglected of an idle mind,
Hides for a moment from the eyes of men;
Or lightly opened by a critic wind,
Affrightedly reviews itself again.


Off through the haze that dances in the shine
The warm sun showers in the open glade,
The forest lies, a silhouette design
Dimmed through and through with shade.


A dreamy day; and tranquilly I lie
At anchor from all storms of mental strain;
With absent vision, gazing at the sky,
"Like one that hears it rain."

The Katydid, so boisterous last night,
Clinging, inverted, in uneasy poise,
Beneath a wheat-blade, has forgotten quite
If "Katy DID or DIDN'T" make a noise.


The twitter, sometimes, of a wayward bird
That checks the song abruptly at the sound,
And mildly, chiding echoes that have stirred,
Sink into silence, all the more profound.


And drowsily I hear the plaintive strain
Of some poor dove . . . Why, I can scarcely keep
My heavy eyelids--there it is again--
"Coo-coo!"--I mustn't--"Coo-coo!"--fall asleep!


James Whitcomb Riley
 
à comparer avec la sieste de José Maria de Heredia (Les Trophées)

Meeting and Passing by Robert FROST

As I went down the hill along the wall

There was a gate I had leaned at for the view

And had just turned from when I first saw you

As you came up the hill.  We met.  But all
We did that day was mingle great and small
Footprints in summer dust as if we drew

The figure of our being less than two

But more than one as yet.  Your parasol
Pointed the decimal off with one deep thrust.

And all the time we talked you seemed to see

Something down there to smile at in the dust.
(Oh, it was without prejudice to me!)
Afterward I went past what you had passed
Before we met and you what I had passed.

by Robert Frost (1874-1963) 

A winter night by Tomas TRANSTROEMER

The storm puts its mouth to the house
and blows to get a tone.
I toss and turn, my closed eyes
reading the storm's text.

The child's eyes grow wide in the dark
and the storm howls for him.
Both love the swinging lamps;
both are halfway towards speech.

The storm has the hands and wings of a child.
Far away, travellers run for cover.
The house feels its own constellation of nails
holding the walls together.

The night is calm in our rooms,
where the echoes of all footsteps rest
like sunken leaves in a pond,
but the night outside is wild.

A darker storm stands over the world.
It puts its mouth to our soul
and blows to get a tone. We are afraid
the storm will blow us empty.

  (Text of the poem in the original Swedish)
Tomas Tranströmer
translated from the Swedish by Robin Robertson

The Deleted World
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

The wereman by Margaret Atwood

My husband walks in the frosted field
an X, a concept
defined against a blank;
he swerves, enters the forest
and is blotted out.

Unheld by my sight
what does he change into
what other shape
blends with the under,
growth, wavers across the pools
is camouflaged from the listening
swamp animals

At noon he will
return; or it may be
only my idea of him
I will find returning
with him hiding behind it.

He may change me also
with the fox eye, the owl
eye, the eightfold
eye of the spider

I can't think
what he will see
when he opens the door


extrait de The Journals of Susanna MOODIE
by Margaret Atwood 
chez Bloomsbury Publishing 
isbn 0-7475 3721 6 

Globule by Alicia Suskin Ostriker

To be transparent, to contain the world,

To be jellyfish, lucent, mobile, membraned,

Boneless behold me, my mica bits

Expensive steel suspended in my substance,

Afloat in floodwater, swinging shoreward,

Ebbing oceanward, clockless among quick fishes

Striped, sported,

Speckled, stippled

Swishing between braincoral cobbles

Granulated brine, ever in motion.

II

From plate tinted a shell’s hard innerness,

Cerise bleeds, leads chilly dawn.

Sunlight struggles downward through wavelets

Near the sound’s warm surface, visible even

From the cliffs of cottages, it pushes relentlessly

Finding us, feeding us, diatoms, sea-lace,

Anemones, kelp. Breathing in our beds,

Bright sunlight sustains us, formidable father,

We who are oblivious, maybe immortal,

Then softens, slants, abruptly dips. There’s darkness.

Brutally cold, the boom of surf unheard,

Over pocked sand, purely indifference,

Rock ridges ready to razor tenderness

Seawater keeps moving forgetfully.

III

Now on the surface moonlight rests like ice

And the far sky blinks its pointed messages,

Pointless to me, about matter’s beginnings-

Membranous, shapeless, rocking undersea,

Both a thing contained and container of mystery,

Smoothness inside of smoothness, cold in cold,

Wishing only to be as I am, transparent,

Textured fleck afloat in a wet world. 

The Crack in Everything (1996) 
page 170-171

in The Little Space 

by Alicia Suskin OSTRIKER 

isbn 0-8229-5680-2

Strip Joint by Ellumbra (2011)

Would you strip away

All that is warm with hope,

Mysterious,

Full of promise,

With the scalpel of your curiosity,

Pare me to skeletal bone,

Enchained forever by your sight,

Your eyes,

Your knowing,

A camera, to steal another soul,

A cage, repealing flight,

A pot, in which to miniaturise,

Is that who you would have me be,

A confirmation of mortality?

read more @ : Cloudpillows (Ellumbra)

Poppies in July by Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)

Little poppies, little hell flames,

Do you do no harm?

You flicker. I cannot touch you.

I put my hands among the flames. Nothing burns.

And it exhausts me to watch you

Flickering like that, wrinkly and clear red, like the skin of a mouth.

A mouth just bloodied.

Little bloody skirts!

There are fumes that I cannot touch.

Where are your opiates, your nauseous capsules?

If I could bleed, or sleep! —

If my mouth could marry a hurt like that!

Or your liquors seep to me, in this glass capsule,

Dulling and stilling.

But colorless. Colorless.

Sylvia Plath  

Bibliography 

Out in the dark par Philip Edward THOMAS (1978-1917)

Out in the dark over the snow
The fallow fawns invisible go
With the fallow doe ;
And the winds blow
Fast as the stars are slow.

Stealthily the dark haunts round

And, when the lamp goes, without sound

At a swifter bound

Than the swiftest hound,

Arrives, and all else is drowned ;

And star and I and wind and deer,

Are in the dark together, - near,

Yet far, - and fear

Drums on my ear

In that sage company drear.

 

How weak and little is the light,

All the universe of sight,

Love and delight,

Before the might,

If you love it not, of night.

Edward THOMAS

Edward THOMAS sur Wiki

Les poèmes de Ed THOMAS sur Poemhunter

The Dead by Rupert BROOKE

These hearts were woven of human joys and cares,
Washed marvellously with sorrow, swift to mirth.
The years had given them kindness. Dawn was theirs,
And sunset, and the colours of the earth.
These had seen movement, and heard music; known
Slumber and waking; loved; gone proudly friended;
Felt the quick stir of wonder; sat alone;
Touched flowers and furs and cheeks. All this is ended.

There are waters blown by changing winds to laughter
And lit by the rich skies, all day. And after,
Frost, with a gesture, stays the waves that dance
And wandering loveliness. He leaves a white
Unbroken glory, a gathered radiance,
A width, a shining peace, under the nights

(from THE WAR SONNETS)

 

"Say, is there Beauty yet to find?
And Certainty? and Quiet kind?
Deep meadows yet, for to forget
The lies, and truths, and pain? ... Oh! yet
Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?"

(from 'The Old Vicarege, Grantchester')

Rupert BROOKE ( 1887-1915)

Whispers of heavenly death by Withman

in LEAVES OF GRASS

Darest thou now O soul,
Walk out with me toward the unknown region,
Where neither ground is for the feet nor any path to follow?

No map there, nor guide,
Nor voice sounding, nor touch of human hand,
Nor face with blooming flesh, nor lips, nor eyes, are in that land.

I know it not O soul,
Nor dost thou, all is a blank before us,
All waits undream'd of in that region, that inaccessible land.

Till when the ties loosen,
All but the ties eternal, Time and Space,
Nor darkness, gravitation, sense, nor any bounds bounding us.

Then we burst forth, we float,
In Time and Space O soul, prepared for them,
Equal, equipt at last, (O joy! O fruit of all!) them to fulfil O soul.

} Whispers of Heavenly Death

Whispers of heavenly death murmur'd I hear,
Labial gossip of night, sibilant chorals,
Footsteps gently ascending, mystical breezes wafted soft and low,
Ripples of unseen rivers, tides of a current flowing, forever flowing,
(Or is it the plashing of tears? the measureless waters of human tears?)

I see, just see skyward, great cloud-masses,
Mournfully slowly they roll, silently swelling and mixing,
With at times a half-dimm'd sadden'd far-off star,
Appearing and disappearing.

(Some parturition rather, some solemn immortal birth;
On the frontiers to eyes impenetrable,
Some soul is passing over.)

Walt WHITMAN ( 1819-1892)

O living always by Walt Whitman

O living always, always dying!
O the burials of me past and present,
O me while I stride ahead, material, visible, imperious as ever;
O me, what I was for years, now dead, (I lament not, I am content;)
O to disengage myself from those corpses of me, which I turn and
look at where I cast them,
To pass on, (O living! always living!) and leave the corpses behind.


Walt WHITMAN (1819-1892)

Poet by Moe SEAGER

You Poet
Set lines afire
Spit vowels bursting
Hot flash: as ideas are food for thought
I could eat your words
Suck the salt of your inner vision
Tap the marrow of meaning

You Poet
I could wade the waters of you mouth
Lick your wind blown tongue to its liquorice roots
Caress melody from your vocal cords

You Poet
Send me turning pages on you
To the end of verse time
Time to ask you
To start it, all, anew

You Poet
I could throw away
My pens and paper plans
Lay my tomes
As stepping stones
To cross over

Let's go out, beyond
Far beyond the last metaphor
A new found hunger
For fresh poems, ripened fruits
Days at play, awesome wander
At the tree of life.

Despair (part II) by Lord Alfred TENNYSON

(...)

II

What did I feel that night? You are curious. How should I tell?
Does it matter so much what I felt? You rescued me—yet—was it well
That you came unwish’d for, uncall’d, between me and the deep and my doom,
Three days since, three more dark days of the Godless gloom
Of a life without sun, without health, with out hope, without any delight
In anything here upon earth? but ah God, that night, that night
When the rolling eyes of the lighthouse there on the fatal neck
Of land running out into rock—they had saved many hundreds from wreck—
Glared on our way toward death, I remember I thought, as we past,
Does it matter how many they saved? we are all of us wreck’d at last—
‘Do you fear?’ and there came thro’ the roar of the breaker a whisper, a breath,
‘Fear? am I not with you? I am frighted at life not death.’

(...)

Lord Alfred TENNYSON

Outside

So, on the ocean of life, we pass and speak one another
Only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.

Henri LONGFELLOW

Tales of a Wayside Inn

Alien influences

Dark shapes approached. Justin let his hood down and pocket his sunglasses. The creatures weren't walking, althought they were upright. They almost glided along the hard-packed sand and had long, twig-thin bodies with shiny black skin, two legs, two arms and wide, oblong heads with large silver eyes. It was easy to see why the colonists had called them dancers : they moved with fluid grace, as if they made every step in time to a music that Justin couldn't hear.

The children were unsupervised except for occasional school days, when workers could be spared to teach. No one watched the children so the children went off to watch the dancers.

Do you want to be an adult, Beth ?

Not anymore.


by Kristine Kathryn RUSCH

Tears, idle tears

by Lord Alfred Tennyson (The Princess IV)

...

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.

Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,
That brings our friends up from the underworld,
Sad as the last which reddens over one
That sinks with all we love below the verge ;
So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.

Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square ;
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

Dear as remembered kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feigned
On lips that are for others ; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret ;
O Death in Life, the days that are no more.

A conqueror worm

... by Edgar Allan POE

Lo! 'tis a gala night
Within the lonesome latter years!
An angel throng, bewinged, bedight
In veils, and drowned in tears,
Sit in a theatre, to see
A play of hopes and fears,
While the orchestra breathes fitfully
The music of the spheres.


Mimes, in the form of God on high,
Mutter and mumble low,
And hither and thither fly-
Mere puppets they, who come and go
At bidding of vast formless things
That shift the scenery to and fro,
Flapping from out their Condor wings
Invisible Woe!


That motley drama–oh, be sure
It shall not be forgot!
With its Phantom chased for evermore,
By a crowd that seize it not,
Through a circle that ever returneth in
To the self-same spot,
And much of Madness, and more of Sin,
And Horror the soul of the plot.


But see, amid the mimic rout
A crawling shape intrude!
A blood-red thing that writhes from out
The scenic solitude!
It writhes!–it writhes!–with mortal pangs
The mimes become its food,
And seraphs sob at vermin fangs
In human gore imbued.


Out–out are the lights–out all!
And, over each quivering form,
The curtain, a funeral pall,
Comes down with the rush of a storm,
While the angels, all pallid and wan,
Uprising, unveiling, affirm
That the play is the tragedy, "Man,"
And its hero the Conqueror Worm.

Blow, bugle, blow by A. Tennyson

...

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)

from The Princess

The splendor falls on castle walls

and snowy summits old in story ;

The long light shakes across the lakes,

And the wild cataract leaps in glory.

Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,

Blow, bugle ; answer, echoes, dying, dying,

dying.

O, hark, O, hear! how thin and clear,

And thinner, clearer, farther going!

O, sweet and far from cliff and scar

The horns of Elfland faintly blowing!

Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying,

Blow, bugle ; answer, echoes, dying, dying,

dying.

O love, they die in yon rich sky,

They faint on hill or field or river ;

Our echoes roll from soul to soul,

And grow for ever and for ever.

Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,

And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying,

dying.

******

I do not love you

...

from Cien Sonetos de Amor (100 Love Sonnets)
`
XVII
`
I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.
`
I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.
`
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way
`
than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

PABLO NERUDA

You who never arrived

...

You who never arrived
in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start,
I don't even know what songs
would please you. I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of the next
moment. All the immense
images in me-- the far-off, deeply-felt landscape,
cities, towers, and bridges, and unsuspected
turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once
pulsing with the life of the gods-
all rise within me to mean
you, who forever elude me.

You, Beloved, who are all
the gardens I have ever gazed at,
longing. An open window
in a country house--, and you almost
stepped out, pensive, to meet me.
Streets that I chanced upon,--
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and, startled,
gave back my too-sudden image. Who knows?
perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, seperate, in the evening...


REINER MARIA RILKE
Translated by Stephen Mitchell