The Voice of the Rain Walt Whitman

And who art thou? said I to the soft-falling shower,

Which, strange to tell, gave me an answer, as here translated:

I am the Poem of Earth, said the voice of the rain,

Eternal I rise impalpable out of the land and the

bottomless sea,

Upward to heaven, whence, vaguely form’d, altogether

changed, and yet the same,

I descend to lave the droughts, atomies, dust-layers of

the globe,

And all that in them without me were seeds only, latent,

unborn;

And forever, by day and night, I give back life to my

own origin,

And make pure and beautify it;

(For song, issuing from its birth-place, after fulfilment,

wandering

Reck’d or unreck’d, duly with love returns.)

A thing of Beauty John Keats

A thing of beauty is a joy forever

Its loveliness increases, it will never

Pass into nothingness; but will keep

A bower quiet for us, and a sleep

Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.

Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing

A flowery band to bind us to the earth,

Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth

Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,

Of all the unhealthy and o’er-darkened ways

Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,

Some shape of beauty moves away the pall

From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon,

Trees old, and young, sprouting a shady boon

A Thing of Beauty/

For simple sheep; and such are daffodils

With the green world they live in; and clear rills

That for themselves a cooling covert make

‘Gainst the hot season; the mid forest brake,

Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms;

And such too is the grandeur of the dooms

We have imagined for the mighty dead;

All lovely tales that we have heard or read;

An endless fountain of immortal drink,

Pouring unto us from the heaven’s brink.

A Road side stand Frost

The little old house was out with a little new shed

In front at the edge of the road where the traffic sped,

A roadside stand that too pathetically pled,

It would not be fair to say for a dole of bread,

But for some of the money, the cash, whose flow supports

The flower of cities from sinking and withering faint.

The polished traffic passed with a mind ahead,

Or if ever aside a moment, then out of sorts

At having the landscape marred with the artless paint

Of signs that with N turned wrong and S turned wrong

Offered for sale wild berries in wooden quarts,

Or crook-necked golden squash with silver warts,

Or beauty rest in a beautiful mountain scene,

You have the money, but if you want to be mean,

Why keep your money (this crossly) and go along.

The hurt to the scenery wouldn’t be my complaint

A Roadside Stand/101

So much as the trusting sorrow of what is unsaid:

Here far from the city we make our roadside stand

And ask for some city money to feel in hand

To try if it will not make our being expand,

And give us the life of the moving-pictures’ promise

That the party in power is said to be keeping from us.

It is in the news that all these pitiful kin

Are to be bought out and mercifully gathered in

To live in villages, next to the theatre and the store,

Where they won’t have to think for themselves anymore,

While greedy good-doers, beneficent beasts of prey,

Swarm over their lives enforcing benefits

That are calculated to soothe them out of their wits,

And by teaching them how to sleep they sleep all day,

Destroy their sleeping at night the ancient way.

Sometimes I feel myself I can hardly bear

The thought of so much childish longing in vain,

The sadness that lurks near the open window there,

That waits all day in almost open prayer

For the squeal of brakes, the sound of a stopping car,

Of all the thousand selfish cars that pass,

Just one to inquire what a farmer’s prices are.

And one did stop, but only to plow up grass

In using the yard to back and turn around;

And another to ask the way to where it was bound;

And another to ask could they sell it a gallon of gas

They couldn’t (this crossly); they had none, didn’t it see?

No, in country money, the country scale of gain,

The requisite lift of spirit has never been found,

Or so the voice of the country seems to complain,

I can’t help owning the great relief it would be

To put these people at one stroke out of their pain.

And then next day as I come back into the sane,

I wonder how I should like you to come to me

And offer to put me gently out of my pain.

An Elementary School Classroom in a Slum- SPENDER

Far far from gusty waves these children’s faces.

Like rootless weeds, the hair torn round their pallor:

The tall girl with her weighed-down head. The paperseeming

boy, with rat’s eyes. The stunted, unlucky heir

Of twisted bones, reciting a father’s gnarled disease,

His lesson, from his desk. At back of the dim class

One unnoted, sweet and young. His eyes live in a dream,

Of squirrel’s game, in tree room, other than this.

On sour cream walls, donations. Shakespeare’s head,

Cloudless at dawn, civilized dome riding all cities.

Belled, flowery, Tyrolese valley. Open-handed map

Awarding the world its world. And yet, for these

Children, these windows, not this map, their world,

Where all their future’s painted with a fog,

An Elementary School Classroom in a Slum Spender

A narrow street sealed in with a lead sky

Far far from rivers, capes, and stars of words.

Surely, Shakespeare is wicked, the map a bad example,

With ships and sun and love tempting them to steal—

For lives that slyly turn in their cramped holes

From fog to endless night? On their slag heap, these children

Wear skins peeped through by bones and spectacles of steel

With mended glass, like bottle bits on stones.

All of their time and space are foggy slum.

So blot their maps with slums as big as doom.

Unless, governor, inspector, visitor,

This map becomes their window and these windows

That shut upon their lives like catacombs,

Break O break open till they break the town

And show the children to green fields, and make their world

Run azure on gold sands, and let their tongues

Run naked into books the white and green leaves open

History theirs whose language is the sun.

The Cloud   I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers,

From the seas and the streams;I bear light shade for the leaves when laidIn their noonday dreams.From my wings are shaken the dews that wakenThe sweet buds every one,When rocked to rest on their mother's breast,As she dances about the sun.I wield the flail of the lashing hail,And whiten the green plains under,And then again I dissolve it in rain,And laugh as I pass in thunder.

I sift the snow on the mountains below,And their great pines groan aghast;And all the night 'tis my pillow white,While I sleep in the arms of the blast.Sublime on the towers of my skiey bowers,Lightning, my pilot, sits;In a cavern under is fettered the thunder,It struggles and howls at fits;

Over earth and ocean, with gentle motion,This pilot is guiding me,Lured by the love of the genii that moveIn the depths of the purple sea;Over the rills, and the crags, and the hills,Over the lakes and the plains,Wherever he dream, under mountain or stream,The Spirit he loves remains;And I all the while bask in Heaven's blue smile,Whilst he is dissolving in rains.

The sanguine Sunrise, with his meteor eyes,And his burning plumes outspread,Leaps on the back of my sailing rack,When the morning star shines dead;As on the jag of a mountain crag,Which an earthquake rocks and swings,An eagle alit one moment may sitIn the light of its golden wings.And when Sunset may breathe, from the lit sea beneath,Its ardors of rest and of love,

And the crimson pall of eve may fallFrom the depth of Heaven above,With wings folded I rest, on mine aery nest,As still as a brooding dove.

That orbed maiden with white fire laden,Whom mortals call the Moon,Glides glimmering o'er my fleece-like floor,By the midnight breezes strewn;And wherever the beat of her unseen feet,Which only the angels hear,May have broken the woof of my tent's thin roof,The stars peep behind her and peer;And I laugh to see them whirl and flee,Like a swarm of golden bees,When I widen the rent in my wind-built tent,Till the calm rivers, lakes, and seas,Like strips of the sky fallen through me on high,Are each paved with the moon and these.

I bind the Sun's throne with a burning zone,And the Moon's with a girdle of pearl;The volcanoes are dim, and the stars reel and swimWhen the whirlwinds my banner unfurl.From cape to cape, with a bridge-like shape,Over a torrent sea,Sunbeam-proof, I hang like a roof,--The mountains its columns be.The triumphal arch through which I marchWith hurricane, fire, and snow,When the Powers of the air are chained to my chair,Is the million-colored bow;The sphere-fire above its soft colors wove,While the moist Earth was laughing below.

I am the daughter of Earth and Water,And the nursling of the Sky;I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores;I change, but I cannot die.For after the rain when with never a stainThe pavilion of Heaven is bare,And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleamsBuild up the blue dome of air,I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,And out of the caverns of rain,Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,I arise and unbuild it again.

Percy Bysshe Shelley