Poetry Assignment
Laurence Perrine suggests, “People have read poetry or listened to it or recited it because they liked it,
because it gave them enjoyment. But this is not the whole answer. Poetry in all ages has been regarded
as important, not simply as one of several alternative forms of amusement, as one person might choose
bowling, another chess, and another poetry. Rather, it has been regarded as something central to
existence, something having unique value to the fully realized life, something that we are better off for
having and without which we are spiritually impoverished.”
John Ciardi writes, “Everyone who has an emotion and a language knows something about poetry. What
he knows may not be much on an absolute scale, and it may not be organized within him in a useful way,
but once he discovers the pleasure of poetry, he is likely to be surprised to discover how much he always
knew without knowing he knew it. He may discover, somewhat as the character in the French play
discovered to his amazement that he had been talking prose all his life, that he had been living poetry.
Poetry, after all, is about life. Anyone who is alive and conscious must have some information about it.”
You should choose one poem from a list of poems I have given you and write a response to that poem.
These responses should be a minimum of one typed page. Due dates are Apr. 8, Apr. 15, Apr. 22,
Apr. 29, and May 6. (I do not accept these late!)
What should you write on a poetry response? You may approach this assignment several ways.
Sometimes students write an analysis of the poem. They explain what is going on in the poem and relate
what they think the theme is. Other students begin with the theme and elaborate on that, while some
apply the poem to themselves by relating a personal experience. Occasionally a student will write a
response on one line from the poem. What you do with the response is up to you as long as you say
something. Do not spend time telling how you could not understand the poem no matter how you tried.
Naturally, I do not expect you to like all the poems, but if you dislike a poem because of its content or
style, then support that with specifics.
Read all the poems from the list every week. Read them at different times, in different places, and in
different moods. You will notice how the poems will reveal themselves to you over the weeks. Although
you are only required to respond on paper to one poem, you should become acquainted with all the poems
on the list.
Inoculation
A Gray Haze Over The Rice Fields
Cotton Mather studied small pox for a while,
instead of sin. Boston was rife with it.
Not being ill himself, thank Providence,
but one day asking his slave, Onesimus,
if he’d ever had the pox. To which Onesimus
replied,
“Yes and No.” Not insubordinate
or anything of the kind, but playful, or perhaps
musing, as one saying to another:
“Consider how a man
can take inside all manner of disease
and still survive.”
Then, graciously, when Mather asked again:
My mother bore me in the southern wild.
She scratched my skin and I got sick, but lived
to come here, free of smallpox, as your slave.
—Susan
Donnelly
A gray haze over the rice fields.
The black cow grazing with her newborn calf—
long-legged, unsteady—
or trucks going past the high road:
such things only claim
that I am looking out in search of memory,
not death. Those little kisses on my cheeks
my long-dead grandmother gave me, or
the soft dampness of my tears when
my mother didn’t notice me
from beyond the closed door of her youth.
Today the dangling thread stops halfway down,
where my hands cannot touch it.
It’s not that I wait for judgment.
But at times I see a shadow
move slowly over these, a shadow freed
from the past and from the future,
that contains the footsteps of that childhood
so light I can only think of squirrels
slipping in and out of the mango trees.
—Jayanta Mahapatra
My Fear
He follows us, he keeps track.
Each day his lists are longer.
Here, death, and here,
something like it.
Mr. Fear, we say in our dreams,
what do you have for me tonight?
And he looks through his sack,
his black sack of troubles.
Maybe he smiles when he finds
the right one. Maybe he’s sorry.
Tell me, Mr. Fear,
what must I carry
away from your dream.
Make it small, please.
Let it fit in my pocket,
let it fall through
the hole in my pocket.
Fear, let me have
a small brown bat
and a purse of crickets
like the ones I heard
singing last night
out there in the stubbly field
before I slept, and met you.
—Lawrence Raab
To Myself
Even when I forget you
I go on looking for you
I believe I would know you
I keep remembering you
sometimes long ago but then
other times I am sure you
were here a moment before
and the air is still alive
around where you were and I
think then I can recognize
you who are always the same
who pretend to be time but
you are not time and who speak
in the words but you are not
what they say you who are not
lost when I do not find you
—W.S. Merwin
A Chinese Bowl
Plucked from a junk shop
chipped celadon
shadow of a swallow’s wing
or cast by venetian blinds
on tinted legal pads
one summer Saturday
in 1957.
Absorbed at his big desk
what could
I drink from you,
clear green tea
or iron-bitter water
that would renew
my fallen life?
—Katha Pollitt
Lost Brother
my father works on briefs.
The little Royal makes
its satisfying clocks
stamping an inky nimbus
around each thick black letter
with cutout moons for “O”s.
Curled up on the floor,
I’m writing, too: “Bean Soup
and Rice,” a play about
a poor girl in Kyoto
and the treasure-finding rabbit
who saves her home. Fluorescent
light spills cleanly down
on the Danish-modern couch
and metal cabinet
which hides no folder labelled
“blacklist” or “Party business”
or “drink” or “mother’s death.”
I think, This is happiness,
right here, right now, these
walls striped green and gray,
shadow and sun, dust motes
stirring the still air,
and a feeling gathers, heavy
as rain about to fall,
part love, part concentration,
part inner solitude.
where is that room, those graygreen thin-lined
scribbled papers
littering the floor?
How did
I move so far away,
just living day by day,
that now all rooms seem strange,
the years all error?
Bowl,
I knew that tree was my lost brother
when I heard he was cut down
at four thousand eight hundred sixty-two years;
I know we had the same mother.
His death pained me. I made up a story.
I realized, when I saw his photograph,
he was an evergreen, a bristlecone like me,
who had lived from an early age
with a certain amount of dieback,
at impossible locations, at elevations
over ten thousand feet in extreme weather.
His company: other conifers,
the rosy finch, the rock wren, the raven and clouds,
blue and silver insects that fed mostly off each other.
Some years bighorn sheep visited in summer—
he was entertained by red bats, black-tailed jackrabbits,
horned lizards, the creatures old and young he sheltered.
Beside him in the shade, pink mountain pennyroyal—
to his south, white angelica.
I am prepared to live as long as he did
(it would please our mother),
live with clouds and those I love
suffering with God.
Sooner or later, some bag of wind will cut me down.
—Stanley Moss
Blackberries for Amelia
Fringing the woods, the stone walls, and the lanes,
Old thickets everywhere have come alive,
Their new leaves reaching out in fans of five
From tangles overarched by this year’s canes.
They have their flowers, too, it being June,
And here or there in brambled dark-and-light
Are small, five-petalled blooms of chalky white,
As random-clustered and as loosely strewn
As the far stars, of which we now are told
That ever faster do they bolt away,
And that a night may come in which, some say,
We shall have only blackness to behold.
I have no time for any change so great,
But I shall see the August weather spur
Berries to ripen where the flowers were—
Dark berries, savage-sweet and worth the wait—
And there will come the moment to be quick
And save some from the birds, and I shall need
Two pails, old clothes in which to stain and bleed,
And a grandchild to talk with while we pick.
—Richard Wilbur
A Work of Artifice
Marge Piercy
(b. 1936)
The bonsai tree
in the attractive pot
could have grown eighty feet tall
on the side of a mountain
till split by lightning.
But a gardener
carefully pruned it.
It is nine inches high.
Every day as he
whittles back the branches
the gardener croons,
It is your nature
to be small and cozy,
domestic and weak;
how lucky, little tree,
to have a pot to grow in.
With living creatures
one must begin very early
to dwarf their growth:
the bound feet,
the crippled brain,
the hair in curlers
the hands you
love to touch.
For the Sleepwalkers
Edward Hirsch
(b. 1950)
Tonight I want to say something wonderful
for the sleepwalkers who have so much faith
in their legs, so much faith in the invisible
arrow carved into the carpet, the worn path
that leads to the stairs instead of the window,
the gaping doorway instead of the seamless
mirror.
I love the way that sleepwalkers are willing
to step out of their bodies into the night,
to raise their arms and welcome the darkness,
palming the blank spaces, touching everything.
Always they return home safely, like blind men
who know it is morning by feeling shadows.
And always they wake up as themselves again.
That’s why I want to say something astonishing
like: Our hearts are leaving our bodies.
Our hearts are thirsty black handkerchiefs
flying through the trees at night, soaking up
the darkest beams of moonlight, the music
of owls, the motion of wind-torn branches.
And now our hearts are thick black fists
flying back to the glove of our chests.
We have to learn to trust our hearts like that.
We have to learn the desperate faith of sleepwalkers who rise out of their calm beds
and walk through the skin of another life.
We have to drink the stupefying cup of darkness
and wake up to ourselves, nourished and
surprised.
Unveiling
Linda Pastan
(b. 1932)
In the cemetery
a mile away
from where we used to live
my aunts and mother,
my father and uncles lie
in two long rows almost the way
they used to sit around
the long planked table
at family dinners.
And walking beside
the graves today, down
one straight path
and up the next,
I don’t feel sad
for them, just left out a bit
as if they kept
from me the kind
of grown-up secret
they used to share
back then, something
I’m not quite ready yet
to learn.
Even If You Weren’t My Father
Camillo Sbarbaro
(1888-1967)
Father, even if you weren’t my father,
were you an utter stranger,
for your own self I’d love you.
Remembering how you saw, one winter morning,
the first violet on the wall across the way,
and with what joy you shared the revelation;
then, hoisting the ladder to your shoulder,
out you went and propped it to the wall.
We, your children, stood watching at the window.
And I remember how, another time,
you chased my little sister through the house
(pigheadedly, she’d done I know not what).
But when she, run to earth, shrieked out in fear,
your heart misgave you,
for you saw yourself hunt down your helpless child.
Relenting then, you took her in your arms
in all her terror: caressing her, enclosed in your
embrace as in some shelter from the brute
who’d been, one moment since, yourself.
Father, even were you not my father,
were you some utter stranger,
for your innocence, your artless tender heart,
I would love above all other men
so love you.
A Noiseless Patient Spider
Walt Whitman
(1819-1892)
A noiseless patient spider,
I marked where on a little promontory it
stood isolated,
Marked how to explore the vacant vast
surrounding,
It launched forth filament, filament,
filament, filament,
out of itself
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly
speeding them.
And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless
oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing,
seeking the
spheres to connect to
Till the bridge you will need be formed, till
the ductile
anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch
somewhere, O
my soul.
The Snow Man
Wallace Stevens
(1879 – 1955)
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold along time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
Reading Myself
Robert Lowell
[Note: Parnassus is a mountain in Greece and,
according to Greek myth, the seat of music and
poetry.]
Like thousands, I took pride and more than just,
struck matches that brought my blood to a boil;
I memorized the tricks to set the river on fire—
Somehow never wrote something to go back to.
Can I suppose I am finished with wax flowers
And have earned my grass on the minor slopes of
Parnassus. . .
No honeycomb is built without a bee
adding circle to circle, cell to cell,
the wax and honey of a mausoleum—
this round dome proves its maker is alive;
the corpse of the insect lives embalmed in honey,
prays that its perishable work lives long
enough for the sweet-tooth bear to desecrate—
this open book . . . my coffin.
The Cat
Miroslav Holub
Outside it was night
like a book without letters.
And the eternal dark
dripped to the stars through the sieve of the
city.
I said to her
do not go
you’ll only be trapped
and bewitched
and will suffer in vain.
I said to her
do not go
why want
nothing?
But a window was opened
and she went,
a black cat into the black night,
she dissolved,
a black cat in the black night,
she just dissolved
and no one ever saw her again.
Not even she herself.
But you can hear her
sometimes,
when it’s quiet
and there’s a northerly wind
and you listen intently
to your own self.
Untitled
Stephen Crane
In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said: “Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;
“But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart.”
Much madness is divinest sense
Emily Dickinson
Much madness is divinest sense
To a discerning eye,
Much sense, the starkest madness.
‘Tis the majority
In this, as all, prevail:
Assent, and you are sane;
Demur, you’re straightway dangerous
And handled with a chain.
Desert Places
Robert Frost
Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.
The woods around it have it—it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness included me unawares.
And lonely as it is that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less—
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars—on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.
The trees in the garden . . .
Introduction to Poetry
Stephen Crane
Billy Collins
The trees in the garden rained flowers.
Children ran there joyously.
They gathered the flowers
Each to himself.
Now there were some
Who gathered great heaps—
--Having opportunity and skill—
Until, behold, only chance blossoms
Remained for the feeble.
Then a little spindling tutor
Ran importantly to the father, crying:
“Pray, come hither!
See this unjust thing in your garden!”
But when the father had surveyed,
He admonished the tutor:
“Not so, small sage!
This thing is just.
For, look you,
Are not they who possess the flowers
Stronger, bolder, and shrewder
Than they who have none?
Why should the strong—
--the beautiful strong—
Why should they not have the flowers?”
It was a dream
Lucille Clifton
in which my greater self
rose up before me
accusing me of my life
with her extra finger
whirling in a gyre of rage
at what my days had come to.
what,
i pleaded with her, could i do,
oh what could I have done?
and she twisted her wild hair
and sparked her wild eyes
and screamed as long as
i could hear her
This. This. This.
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
they begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
Heritage
James Still
I shall not leave these prisoning hills
Though they topple their barren heads to level earth
And the forests slide uprooted out of the sky.
Though the waters of Troublesome, of Trace Fork,
Of Sand Lick rise in a single body to glean the valleys,
To drown lush pennyroyal, to unravel rail fences;
Though the sun-ball breaks the ridges into dust
And burns its strength into the blistered rock
I cannot leave. I cannot go away.
Being of these hills, being one with the fox
Stealing into the shadows, one with the new-born foal,
The lumbering ox drawing green beech logs to mill,
One with the destined feet of man climbing and descending
And one with death rising to bloom again, I cannot go.
Being of these hills, I cannot pass beyond.
Turning Pro
Ishmael Reed
There are just so many years
you can play amateur baseball
without turning pro
All of the sudden you realize
you’re ten years older than
everybody in the dugout
and that the shortstop could
be your son.
The front office complains
about your slowness in making
the line-up
They send down memos about
your faulty bunts and point out
how the runners are always faking
you out
“His ability to steal bases
has faded” they say
They say they can’t convince
the accountant that there’s such
a thing as “Old Time’s Sake”
But just as the scribes were
beginning to write you
off
as a has-been on his last leg
You pulled out that fateful
shut-out
and the whistles went off
and the fireworks scorched a
747
And your name lit up the scoreboard
and the fans carried you on their
shoulders right out of the stadium
and into the majors.
A Poison Tree
William Blake
I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.
And I watered it in fears,
Night and morning with my tears;
And I sunned it with smiles,
And with soft, deceitful wiles.
And it grew both day and night
Till it bore an apple bright;
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine,
And into my garden stole
When the night had veiled the pole;
In the morning glad I see
My foe outstretched beneath the tree.
The Explosion
Philip Larkin
On the day of the explosion
Shadows pointed toward the pithead:
In the sun the slagheap slept.
Down the lane came men in pitboots
Coughing oath-edged talk and pipe-smoke,
Shouldering off the freshened silence.
One chased after rabbits; lost them;
Came back with a nest of lark’s eggs;
Showed them; lodged them in the grasses.
So they passed in beards and moleskins,
Fathers, brothers, nicknames, laughter,
Through the tall gates standing open.
At noon, there came a tremor; cows
Stopped chewing for a second; sun,
Scarfed as in a heat-daze, dimmed.
The dead go on before us, they
Are sitting in God’s house in comfort,
We shall see them face to face—
Plain as lettering in the chapels
It was said, and for a second
Wives saw men of the explosion
Larger than life they managed—
Gold as on a coin, or walking
Somehow from the sun towards them,
One showing the eggs unbroken.