A.P. Lit./ Comp: Poetry Unit 7
My Heart Leaps Up
That the Night Come
William Wordsworth
William Butler Yeats
My heart leaps up when I behold
She lived in storm and strife,
A rainbow in the sky:
Her soul had such desire
So was it when my life began;
For what proud death may bring
So is it now I am a man;
That it could not endure
So be it when I shall grow old,
The common good of life,
Or let me die!
But lived as 'twere a king
The child is father of the man;
That packed his marriage day
And I could wish my days to be
With banneret and pennon,
Bound each to each by natural piety.
Trumpet and kettledrum,
And the outrageous cannon,
To bundle time away
Waiting for the Storm
Timothy Steele
Breeze sent a wrinkling darkness
Across the bay. I knelt
Beneath an upturned boat,
And, moment by moment felt
The sand at my feet grow colder,
The damp air chill and spread.
Then the first rain drops sounded
On the hull above my head.
That the night come.
A.P. Lit./ Comp: Poetry Unit 7
When I was one-and-twenty
My Papa’s Waltz
A.E. Housman
Theodore Roethke
When I was one-and-twenty
The whiskey on your breath
I heard a wise man say,
“Give crowns and pounds and guineas
But not your heart away;
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.
Give pearls away and rubies
But keep your fancy free.”
We romped until the pans
But I was one-and-twenty,
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
No use to talk to me.
My mother’s countenance
Could not unfrown itself.
When I was one-and-twenty
I heard him say again,
“The heart out of the bosom
Was never given in vain;
‘Tis paid with sighs a plenty
The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.
And sold for endless rue.”
And I am two-and-twenty
And oh, ‘tis true, ‘tis true.
You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.