Designed by Sherry Xu for ARTD 218
Discover your
Emotion with Poetry
Designed by Sherry Xu for ARTD 218
ALICE CORBIN HENDERSON (1917)
The odor of death
In the front of my body,
The odor of death
Before me --
Is there any one
Who would weep for me?
My wife
Would weep for me.
MARGUERITE ARNOLD (1925)
Wheeling and cawing,
Her mind takes flight --
Like crows lifting,
Startled at night.
She sends streamers
Into the air.
Her thoughts dismember
Just anywhere.
WENDELL BERRY (1971)
The hook of adrenalin shoves
into the blood. Man’s will,
long schooled to kill or have
its way, would drive the beast
against nature, transcend
the impossible in simple fury.
The blow falls like a dead seed.
It is defeat, for beasts
do not pardon, but heal or die
in the absence of the past.
The blow survives in the man.
His triumph is a wound. Spent,
he must wait the slow
unalterable forgiveness of time
VIRGINIA MOORE (1926)
I could bear grief, if it were only thorough.
If it were sharp and brief,
And measured to my strongest mesh of armor,
I could bear grief.
But sadness like the echo of a snowfall
Upon a film of snow,
Because it seems unworthy of my rapier,
Too slight a foe,
Betrays me as I sit and sing at evening
For happiness half won.
I am undone by sifting snowflake sadness--
I am undone.
ROSALIND MASON (1916)
A blue sky, with the morning’s freshness in it;
A live wind on the hill-top blowing free;
The thin clear pipe of some close-perching linnet:
Beyond the hills the sunlight on the sea.
AMY LOWELL (1914)
I have been temperate always,
But I am like to be very drunk
With your coming.
There have been times
I feared to walk down the street
Lest I should reel with the wine of you,
And jerk against my neighbors
As they go by.
I am parched now, and my tongue is horrible in my mouth,
But my brain is noisy
With the clash and gurgle of filling
wine-cups.