This passage from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” based on the character in Homer’s Odyssey, continues: “Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough gleams that untraveled world whose margin fades forever and ever when I move. How dull it is to pause.” Indeed! How dull the world would be without fine … Read More
Category: poetry
“Some part of art is the art of waiting”
The poet Ted Kooser — who won the Pulitzer Prize after he retired — knows something about art and waiting. However, that doesn’t mean he’s a calm poet. His poem “Memory” starts like this: “Spinning up dust and cornhusks as it crossed the chalky, exhausted fields, it sucked up into … Read More
“The name of the author is the first to go, followed obediently by the title, the plot…”
The poem “Forgetfulness” by Billy Collins continues: “the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of, as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain, to a … Read More
“There’s a certain Slant of light, Winter Afternoons — that oppresses, like the Heft of Cathedral Tunes –“
Where would we be, during difficult winters like this one, without the help of Emily Dickinson? This poem ends with these lines:
“When it comes, the Landscape listens —
Shadows — hold their breath —
When it goes, ’tis like the Distance
On the look of Death — ”… Read More
“Maybe imagination is just a form of memory, locked deep in . . . eternity.”
The poet Ron Wallace can be described as “part Emily Dickinson and part Harpo Marx” because of his dark wit, which you can see in the opening of this sonnet:
The Bad Sonnet
It stayed up late, refused to go to bed,
and when it did it sang loud songs … Read More
“Whoever you are come travel with me. Traveling with me you find what never tires.”
The poem continues: “The earth never tires. The earth is rude, silent incomprehensible at first. . . be not discouraged, keep on. . . there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell.” I once wrote these words on my kitchen wall so that my kids would grow up … Read More
“. . . Heaven may be only the mind’s fear of the wonders it imagines. . .”
If you read only one poem today (or this week, or this month), let it be “Ancestral Lights” by Deborah Digges. Here is more of the sentence that the quotation comes from: “And though I know now that heaven may be only the mind’s fear of the … Read More
Some time when the river is ice ask me what mistakes I have made.
“…the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting…”
Today, Thanksgiving Day, should not end before we think about the writers who have changed us. For me, the one who floats to the top this year is Mary Oliver. It’s hard not to say “wow” after reading a poem like “Wild Geese” . You might expect it to … Read More
“I am the rest between two notes . . . in the dark interval, reconciled, they stay there trembling.”
This poem about tension and transition is classic Rainer Marie Rilke. He explored both of these dynamics frequently in a his letters, which were published in a book titled Letters to a Young Poet. (They are among the most famous, best -loved letters in all of literature.) In them, … Read More
“I wandered lonely as a cloud”
This is the opening line of a poem written by the revolutionary William Wordsworth in 1804. He shook things up by experimenting with “real language” (as opposed to the formal style found in serious writing), and he wrote about feelings (as opposed to intellectual matters). This line has stuck with … Read More