Intro to Lit Study & Comp
Mrs. Jindra
Poetry
Name _____________________________________________
Period ______
Blackberry Eating
I love to go out in late September
among fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries
to eat blackberries for breakfast,
the stalks very prickly, a penalty
they earn for knowing the black art
of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them
lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries
fall almost unbidden to my tongue,
as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words
like strengths or squinched,
many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps,
which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well
in the silent, startled, icy black language
of blackberry-eating in late September.
(5)
(10)
Galway Kinnell (b. 1927)
Those Winter Sundays
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
(5)
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
(10)
Robert Hayden (1913 – 1980)
Fire and Ice
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
(5)
Robert Frost (1874-1963)
Mirror
I am silver and exact. I have not preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful –
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.
(5)
Now I am a lake. A women bends over me,
(10)
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
(11)
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.
Sylvia Plath ( 1932-1963)
Fog
Carl Sandburg
The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.
The Base Stealer
Robert Francis
Poised between going on and back, pulled
Both ways taut like a tight-rope walker,
Fingertips pointing the opposites,
Now bouncing tiptoe like a dropped ball,
Or a kid skipping rope, come on, come on!
Running a scattering of steps sidewise,
How he teeters, skitters, tingles, teases,
Taunts them, hovers like an ecstatic bird,
He’s only flirting, crowd him, crowd him,
Delicate, delicate, delicate, delicate – Now!
Sonnet 130
My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask’d, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.
William Shakespeare
After Apple-Picking
By Robert Frost 1874–1963
My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there's a barrel that I didn't fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.
One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it's like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.
Butterfly
Feeling breathless
Sweet air fills my lungs
and makes me dizzy as
I race after.
The butterfly bobs on invisible crests of wind.
In the gold spectacled trees with blackened bark
fresh from an early morning shower?
By the swaying stalks of grass and wild flowers
that keep time to a fond old song?
In the paper blue sky that comforts us from the
blackness? I spin around and around, drunk on the
drippings of honeysuckle in the air.
Ah.
Swirling. Fluttering. Disappearing in between
the hard midday shadows and swaying luminescent
green hands of an oak tree.
Intricate webs and loops on his wings stretched
like raindrops in the wind.
Yellow and maroon glow like a specter in the
night. The stained glassed windows of the outdoor
cathedral. He dances by my fingertips. Free.
As he waves his painted canvases up and down,
against the splashes of wind,
I imagine his smudged wings between my fingers,
smeared with his sparkling grey magic.
His silent scream rails me like a tidal wave
sending me over the cliffs from paradise.
I follow the butterfly's cascading flight of
freedom toward the flossy green meadow where it
meets with another.
They flutter together playfully as I marvel at
the pure blue sky.
Butterfly-Catcher
By Jason Y. Sproul
I live with snippets of poetry
A hook, a verse, a turn of phrase
Catching on the subtleties of my mind
And music will not let me escape
The forceful grasp of its metered time
Each day becomes frustration,
Trying to snatch in fleeting infinitesimalities
A fragile butterfly
That swiftly, swiftly dashes itself
Against my limitations, shattering
Into a rain of crystal tears
And lost ideas.
Look upon these thousand
Tiny deaths, and if you weep,
Understand the weight upon my soul
For every butterfly alights upon
My trembling hand, a constellation more
I cannot have--they are not mine to keep
So if at times I may seem mired
Deep in contemplation, half asleep
Recall that I am wandering
Lost inside my mindscape,
Desperately gathering delicate allusions
Saving glass-made butterflies
Under photographic skies.
The Seven Ages of Man
William Shakespeare
All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players,
They have their exits and entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.
Then, the whining schoolboy with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden, and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice
In fair round belly, with good capon lin'd,
With eyes severe, and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws, and modern instances,
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose, and pouch on side,
His youthful hose well sav'd, a world too wide,
For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,
Turning again towards childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.