Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear;…| The Poetry Foundation
"I opened to my beloved, but my beloved had with drawen himself" (Authorized Version, 1611). My dear, then I will serve I will serve compare Luke 12:37. "Blessed are those servants, whom the Lord when he commeth, shall find watching: Verily, I say unto you, That he shall gird himself, and make them…| The Poetry Foundation
Strong gongs groaning as the guns boom far, Don John of Austria is going to the war, Stiff flags straining in the night-blasts cold In the gloom black-purple, in the glint old-gold, Torchlight crimson on the copper kettle-drums, Then the tuckets, then the trumpets, then the cannon, and he comes.…| The Poetry Foundation
Poems, readings, poetry news and the entire 110-year archive of POETRY magazine.| The Poetry Foundation
Poems, readings, poetry news and the entire 110-year archive of POETRY magazine.| The Poetry Foundation
Part I On either side the river lie Long fields of barley and of rye, That clothe the wold and meet the sky; And thro' the field the road runs by To many-tower'd Camelot; The yellow-leaved waterlily The green-sheathed daffodilly Tremble in the water chilly Round about Shalott. Piling the sheaves in…| The Poetry Foundation
Poems, readings, poetry news and the entire 110-year archive of POETRY magazine.| The Poetry Foundation
Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness, Thou foster-child of silence and slow time, Sylvan historian, who canst thus express A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme: What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape Of deities or mortals, or of both, In Tempe or the dales of Arcady? Heard…| The Poetry Foundation
Poems, readings, poetry news and the entire 110-year archive of POETRY magazine.| The Poetry Foundation
Poems, readings, poetry news and the entire 110-year archive of POETRY magazine.| The Poetry Foundation
Poems, readings, poetry news and the entire 110-year archive of POETRY magazine.| The Poetry Foundation
Poems, readings, poetry news and the entire 110-year archive of POETRY magazine.| The Poetry Foundation
Soon, soon the flesh The grave cave ate will be At home on me And I a smiling woman. I may be skin and bone, Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman. They had to call and call And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls. It’s the theatrical Comeback in broad day To the same place, the same…| The Poetry Foundation
Poems, readings, poetry news and the entire 110-year archive of POETRY magazine.| The Poetry Foundation
Poems, readings, poetry news and the entire 110-year archive of POETRY magazine.| The Poetry Foundation
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea. And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething, As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing, A mighty fountain momently was forced: Amid…| The Poetry Foundation
I I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and…| The Poetry Foundation
Poems, readings, poetry news and the entire 110-year archive of POETRY magazine.| The Poetry Foundation
Away to the window I flew like a flash, Tore open the shutters and threw up the sash. dash away all!" As leaves that before the wild hurricane fly, When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky; So up to the housetop the coursers they flew With the sleigh full of toys, and St. He was dressed…| The Poetry Foundation
When I see birches bend to left and right Across the lines of straighter darker trees, I like to think some boy’s been swinging them. Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust— Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away You'd think the inner…| The Poetry Foundation
Poems, readings, poetry news and the entire 110-year archive of POETRY magazine.| The Poetry Foundation
i Tell me it was for the hunger & nothing less. For hunger is to give the body what it knows it cannot keep. You, pushing your body into the river only to be left with yourself — stay. i I’ll tell you how we’re wrong enough to be forgiven. My thrashing beneath you like a sparrow stunned with…| The Poetry Foundation
Poems, readings, poetry news and the entire 110-year archive of POETRY magazine.| The Poetry Foundation
1 I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. Creeds and schools in abeyance, Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten, I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard, Nature…| The Poetry Foundation
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes, The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes, Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening, Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains, Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys, Slipped by the terrace, made…| The Poetry Foundation
i made it up here on this bridge between between / starshine and clay Compare to John Keats’s “betwixt damnation and impassion’d clay” in “On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again.” starshine and clay, between / starshine and clay Compare to John Keats’s “betwixt damnation and impassion’d clay”…| The Poetry Foundation
Poems, readings, poetry news and the entire 110-year archive of POETRY magazine.| The Poetry Foundation
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk: 'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, But being too happy in thine happiness,— That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees In…| The Poetry Foundation
All down the line Fresh couples climbed aboard: the rest stood round; The last confetti and advice were thrown, And, as we moved, each face seemed to define Just what it saw departing: children frowned At something dull; fathers had never known Success so huge and wholly farcical; The women shared…| The Poetry Foundation
Something there is that does n’t love a wall, That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, And spills the upper boulders in the sun; And makes gaps even two can pass abreast. He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’ Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder If I could put a notion in his…| The Poetry Foundation
Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling, By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore, “Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou,” I said, “art sure no craven, Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore— Tell me what thy lordly name is on the…| The Poetry Foundation
Morning and evening Maids heard the goblins cry: “Come buy our orchard fruits, Come buy, come buy: Apples and quinces, Lemons and oranges, Plump unpeck’d cherries, Melons and raspberries, Bloom-down-cheek’d peaches, Swart-headed mulberries, Wild free-born cranberries, Crab-apples, dewberries,…| The Poetry Foundation
Poems, readings, poetry news and the entire 110-year archive of POETRY magazine.| The Poetry Foundation
To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour A Robin Red breast in a Cage Puts all Heaven in a Rage A Dove house filld with Doves & Pigeons Shudders Hell thr' all its regions A dog starvd at his Masters Gate…| The Poetry Foundation
The Burial of the Dead April is the cruellest month April is the cruellest month The Waste Land begins with a subversion of the first lines of the General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales , by Geoffrey ChaucerI It is, ironically, winter that “kept us warm.” , breeding Lilacs out of the dead land,…| The Poetry Foundation
It little profits that an idle king, By this still hearth, among these barren crags, Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole Unequal laws unto a savage race, That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me. I cannot rest from travel: I will drink Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy'd…| The Poetry Foundation
