AP SENIOR LIT POETRY PROJECT

POEM PACKET

All poems taken from The Bedford Introduction to Literature 8 th edition 2008. Michael Meyer ed unless indicated.

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“INTRODUCTION TO POETRY” BY: BILLY COLLINS

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.

Billy Collins, “Introduction to Poetry” from The Apple that Astonished Paris. Copyright 1988

Welcome to your “brief” overview of poetry! On pages 3-31 you will find a vast selection of poems to use as primary poems for your weekly poetry responses. On pages 32-33 you will find five supplemental poems if you choose to do a compare/contrast analysis; you may also use the above Billy Collins poem. Remember to look for the “big picture” and address connections in each response and never forget that what lies between the lines unspoken might be the most vital. …Oh, and thesis statements, always.

ENJOY!

Yousif al-Sa’igh, “An Iraqi Evening” – p.1309

Clips from the battlefield

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on an Iraqi evening:

a peacable home

two boys preparing their homework

a little girl

absentmindedly drawing on scrap paper

funny pictures.

--breaking news coming shortly.

The entire house becomes ears

ten Iraqi eyes glued to the screen in frightened silence.

Smells mingle:

the smell of war

and the smell of just baked bread.

The mother raises her eyes to a photo on the wall

whispering

--May God protect you

and begins preparing their supper

quietly

while in her mind

clips of the battlefield flicker by

carefully selected for hope.

“February” By Margaret Atwood –p. 910

Winter. Time to eat fat

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and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat, a black fur sausage with yellow Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed and tries to get onto my head. It’s his way of telling whether or not I’m dead. If I’m not, he wants to be scratched; if I am He’ll think of something. He settles on my chest, breathing his breath of burped-up meat and musty sofas, purring like a washboard. Some other tomcat, not yet a capon, has been spraying our front door, declaring war. It’s all about sex and territory, which are what will finish us off in the long run. Some cat owners around here should snip a few testicles. If we wise hominids were sensible, we’d do that too, or eat our young, like sharks. But it’s love that does us in. Over and over again, He shoots, he scores! and famine crouches in the bedsheets, ambushing the pulsing eiderdown, and the windchill factor hits thirty below, and pollution pours out of our chimneys to keep us warm. February, month of despair, with a skewered heart in the centre. I think dire thoughts, and lust for French fries with a splash of vinegar. Cat, enough of your greedy whining and your small pink bumhole. Off my face! You’re the life principle, more or less, so get going on a little optimism around here. Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.

Margaret Atwood, “February” from Morning in the Burned House. Copyright © 1995 by Margaret Atwood. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

“The Fish” - Poem by Elizabeth Bishop-p.781

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I caught a tremendous fishand held him beside the boathalf out of water, with my hookfast in a corner of his mouth.He didn't fight.He hadn't fought at all.He hung a grunting weight,battered and venerableand homely. Here and therehis brown skin hung in stripslike ancient wallpaper,and its pattern of darker brownwas like wallpaper:shapes like full-blown rosesstained and lost through age.He was speckled with barnacles,fine rosettes of lime,and infestedwith tiny white sea-lice,and underneath two or threerags of green weed hung down.While his gills were breathing inthe terrible oxygen- the frightening gills,fresh and crisp with blood,that can cut so badly- I thought of the coarse white fleshpacked in like feathers,the big bones and the little bones,the dramatic reds and blacksof his shiny entrails,and the pink swim-bladderlike a big peony.I looked into his eyeswhich were far larger than minebut shallower, and yellowed,the irises backed and packedwith tarnished tinfoilseen through the lensesof old scratched isinglass.They shifted a little, but notto return my stare.- It was more like the tippingof an object toward the light.I admired his sullen face,the mechanism of his jaw,and then I sawthat from his lower lip

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- if you could call it a lipgrim, wet, and weaponlike,hung five old pieces of fish-line,or four and a wire leaderwith the swivel still attached,with all their five big hooksgrown firmly in his mouth.A green line, frayed at the endwhere he broke it, two heavier lines,and a fine black threadstill crimped from the strain and snapwhen it broke and he got away.Like medals with their ribbonsfrayed and wavering,a five-haired beard of wisdomtrailing from his aching jaw.I stared and staredand victory filled upthe little rented boat,from the pool of bilgewhere oil had spread a rainbowaround the rusted engineto the bailer rusted orange,the sun-cracked thwarts,the oarlocks on their strings,the gunnels- until everythingwas rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! And I let the fish go.

“To My Dear and Loving Husband” By Anne Bradstreet p. 1241

If ever two were one, then surely we.If ever man were loved by wife, then thee.If ever wife was happy in a man,Compare with me, ye women, if you can.I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold,Or all the riches that the East doth hold.My love is such that rivers cannot quench,Nor ought but love from thee give recompense.Thy love is such I can no way repay;The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray.Then while we live, in love let’s so persever,That when we live no more, we may live ever.

“We Real Cool” Gwendolyn Brooks – p. 860

THE POOL PLAYERS.

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SEVEN AT THE GOLDEN SHOVEL.

We real cool. We

Left school. We

Lurk late. We

Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We

Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We

Die soon.

From The Bean Eaters by Gwendolyn Brooks, published by Harpers. © 1960 by Gwendolyn Brooks. Used with permission. All rights reserved.

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner - Randall Jarrell p.832

From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,

And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.

Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,

I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.

When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

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[in Just—] By E. E. Cummings p. 1034

in Just- spring          when the world is mud- luscious the little lame balloonman

whistles          far          and wee

and eddieandbill come running from marbles and piracies and it's spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queer old balloonman whistles far          and             wee and bettyandisbel come dancing

from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it's spring and

         the

                  goat-footed

balloonMan          whistles far and wee

*spelling and capitalization are as they appear in the poem and are intentional on the part of the poet*

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Holy Sonnets: “Death, be not proud” : By John Donne p. 1058

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee

Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;

For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow

Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,

Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,

And soonest our best men with thee do go,

Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.

Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,

And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,

And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well

And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?

One short sleep past, we wake eternally

And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

“Heat”-H. D . , p. 881

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O wind, rend open the heat,

cut apart the heat,

rend it to tatters.

Fruit cannot drop

through this thick air--

fruit cannot fall into heat

that presses up and blunts

the points of pears

and rounds the grapes.

Cut the heat--

plough through it,

turning it on either side

of your path.

Copyright © 1982 by the Estate of Hilda Doolittle. Used with permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation

“Pass/Fail” - Linda Pastan p.125210

Examination dreams are reported to persist even into old age...                                                                                                                -Time magazine

You will never graduatefrom this dreamof blue books.No matter howyou succeed awake,asleep there is a testwaiting to be failed.The dream beckonswith two dull pencils,but you haven't eventaken the course;when you reach for a book - it closes its door in your face; whenyou conjugate a verb - it is in the wrong language.Now the pillow becomesa blank page. Turn it to the cool side;you will still smotherin all of the feathersthat have to be learnedby heart.

                        c. 1975

*NOTE: excerpt from “Time” is part of the poem and is intentional on the part of the poet*

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“The Forge” by Seamus Heaney- p. 1013

All I know is a door into the dark.Outside, old axles and iron hoops rusting;Inside, the hammered anvil’s short-pitched ring,The unpredictable fantail of sparksOr hiss when a new shoe toughens in water.The anvil must be somewhere in the centre,Horned as a unicorn, at one end and square,Set there immoveable: an altarWhere he expends himself in shape and music.Sometimes, leather-aproned, hairs in his nose,He leans out on the jamb, recalls a clatterOf hoofs where traffic is flashing in rows;Then grunts and goes in, with a slam and flickTo beat real iron out, to work the bellows.

“The Forge” appears in Seamus Heaney’s second volume of poetry, Door into the Dark (1969), and the title of the collection is taken from the first line of this poem.

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“To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time”: Robert Herrick – p. 842

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,

Old Time is still a-flying;

And this same flower that smiles today

Tomorrow will be dying.

The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,

The higher he’s a-getting,

The sooner will his race be run,

And nearer he’s to setting.

That age is best which is the first,

When youth and blood are warmer;

But being spent, the worse, and worst

Times still succeed the former.

Then be not coy, but use your time,

And while ye may, go marry;

For having lost but once your prime,

You may forever tarry.

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“The Negro Speaks of Rivers” -Langston Hughes – p.1162

I’ve known rivers:

I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the

flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.

I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.

I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.

I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln

went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy

bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I’ve known rivers:

Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

From The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Copyright © 1994

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La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad : By John Keats-p.1335

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

       Alone and palely loitering?

The sedge has withered from the lake,

       And no birds sing.

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

       So haggard and so woe-begone?

The squirrel’s granary is full,

       And the harvest’s done.

I see a lily on thy brow,

       With anguish moist and fever-dew,

And on thy cheeks a fading rose

       Fast withereth too.

I met a lady in the meads,

       Full beautiful—a faery’s child,

Her hair was long, her foot was light,

       And her eyes were wild.

I made a garland for her head,

       And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;

She looked at me as she did love,

       And made sweet moan

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I set her on my pacing steed,

       And nothing else saw all day long,

For sidelong would she bend, and sing

       A faery’s song.

She found me roots of relish sweet,

       And honey wild, and manna-dew,

And sure in language strange she said—

       ‘I love thee true’.

She took me to her Elfin grot,

       And there she wept and sighed full sore,

And there I shut her wild wild eyes

       With kisses four.

And there she lullèd me asleep,

       And there I dreamed—Ah! woe betide!—

The latest dream I ever dreamt

       On the cold hill side.

I saw pale kings and princes too,

       Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;

They cried—‘La Belle Dame sans Merci

       Thee hath in thrall!’

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I saw their starved lips in the gloam,

       With horrid warning gapèd wide,

And I awoke and found me here,

       On the cold hill’s side.

And this is why I sojourn here,

       Alone and palely loitering,

Though the sedge is withered from the lake,

       And no birds sing.

Notes:POL participants and judges: in this poem's third-to-last stanza, recitations that include “Hath thee in thrall!” or “Thee hath in thrall!” are both acceptable.

"I Will Put Chaos in Fourteen Lines" : Edna St. Vincent Millay – p.1011

I will put Chaos into fourteen linesAnd keep him there; and let him thence escapeIf he be lucky; let him twist, and apeFlood, fire, and demon --- his adroit designsWill strain to nothing in the strict confinesOf this sweet order, where, in pious rape,I hold his essence and amorphous shape,Till he with Order mingles and combines.Past are the hours, the years of our duress,His arrogance, our awful servitude:I have him. He is nothing more nor lessThan something simple not yet understood;I shall not even force him to confess;Or answer. I will only make him good.

“Overalls” (1944) Robert Morgan – p. 1051

Even the biggest man will look

babylike in overalls, bib

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up to his neck holding the trousers

high on his belly, with no chafing

at the waist, no bulging over

the belt. But it’s the pockets on

the chest that are most interesting,

buttons and snaps like medals, badges,

flaps open with careless ease, thin

sheath for the pencil, little pockets

and pouches and the main zipper

compartment like a wallet over

the heart and the slit where the watch

goes, an eye where the chain is caught.

Every bit of surface is taken

up with patches, denim mesas

and envelopes, a many-level

cloth topography. And bellow,

the loops for hammers and pliers

like holsters for going armed

and armored yet free-handed

into the field another day

for labor’s playful war with time.

“Rite of Passage” :By Sharon Olds – p.1047

As the guests arrive at our son’s party   

they gather in the living room—

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short men, men in first grade

with smooth jaws and chins.

Hands in pockets, they stand around

jostling, jockeying for place, small fights

breaking out and calming. One says to another

How old are you? —Six. —I’m seven. —So?

They eye each other, seeing themselves   

tiny in the other’s pupils. They clear their   

throats a lot, a room of small bankers,

they fold their arms and frown. I could beat you

up, a seven says to a six,

the midnight cake, round and heavy as a

turret behind them on the table. My son,

freckles like specks of nutmeg on his cheeks,   

chest narrow as the balsa keel of a   

model boat, long hands

cool and thin as the day they guided him   

out of me, speaks up as a host

for the sake of the group.

We could easily kill a two-year-old,

he says in his clear voice. The other   

men agree, they clear their throats

like Generals, they relax and get down to   

playing war, celebrating my son’s life.

Sharon Olds, “Rite of Passage” from Strike Sparks: Selected Poems 1980-2002. Copyright © 2004

“The Secretary Chant” : Marge Piercy – p.770

My hips are a desk,  From my ears hang 

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chains of paper clips.  Rubber bands form my hair.  My breasts are quills of  mimeograph ink.  My feet bear casters,  Buzz. Click.  My head is a badly organized file.  My head is a switchboard  where crossed lines crackle.  Press my fingers  and in my eyes appear  credit and debit.  Zing. Tinkle.  My navel is a reject button.  From my mouth issue canceled reams.  Swollen, heavy, rectangular  I am about to be delivered  of a baby  Xerox machine.  File me under W  because I wonce  was  a woman.

Circa 1973

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“Naming of Parts” By Henry Reed – p. 943

Today we have naming of parts. Yesterday, We had daily cleaning. And tomorrow morning, We shall have what to do after firing. But today, Today we have naming of parts. JaponicaGlistens likecoral in all the neighboring gardens, And today we have naming of parts.

This is the lower sling swivel. And thisIs the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see, When you are given your slings. And this is the piling swivel, Which in your case you have not got. The branchesHold in the gardens their silent, eloquent gestures, Which in our case we have not got.

This is the safety-catch, which is always releasedWith an easy flick of the thumb. And please do not let meSee anyone using his finger. You can do it quite easyIf you have any strength in your thumb. The blossomsAre fragile and motionless, never letting anyone seeAny of them using their finger.

And this you can see is the bolt. The purpose of thisIs to open the breech, as you see. We can slide itRapidly backwards and forwards: we call thisEasing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwardsThe early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers: They call it easing the Spring.

They call it easing the Spring: it is perfectly easyIf you have any strength in your thumb: like the bolt, And the breech, the cocking-piece, and the point of balance, Which in our case we have not got; and the almond blossomSilent in all of the gardens and the bees going backwards and forwards, For today we have the naming of parts.

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“My Papa’s Waltz” : By Theodore Roethke – p. 999

The whiskey on your breath   

Could make a small boy dizzy;   

But I hung on like death:   

Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans   

Slid from the kitchen shelf;   

My mother’s countenance   

Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist   

Was battered on one knuckle;   

At every step you missed

My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head   

With a palm caked hard by dirt,   

Then waltzed me off to bed   

Still clinging to your shirt.

Theodore Roethke, "My Papa's Waltz" from Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke.  Copyright 1942 by Heast Magazines, Inc.

Sonnet 29: “When, in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes” William Shakespeare-p.1344

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When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,

I all alone beweep my outcast state,

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,

And look upon myself and curse my fate,

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,

Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,

Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,

With what I most enjoy contented least;

Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,

Haply I think on thee, and then my state,

(Like to the lark at break of day arising

From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;

       For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings

       That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

“Ozymandias” By: Percy Bysshe Shelley- p. 1344

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I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

“The Youngest Daughter” By Cathy Song – p. 857

The sky has been dark for many years. My skin has become as damp and pale as rice paper and feels the way mother’s used to before the drying sun   parched it out there in the fields.

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      Lately, when I touch my eyelids, my hands react as if I had just touched something hot enough to burn. My skin, aspirin colored,   tingles with migraine. Mother has been massaging the left side of my face   especially in the evenings   when the pain flares up.

This morning her breathing was graveled, her voice gruff with affection   when I wheeled her into the bath.   She was in a good humor, making jokes about her great breasts,   floating in the milky water like two walruses, flaccid and whiskered around the nipples.   I scrubbed them with a sour taste   in my mouth, thinking: six children and an old man have sucked from these brown nipples.

I was almost tender when I came to the blue bruises that freckle her body, places where she has been injecting insulin   for thirty years. I soaped her slowly, she sighed deeply, her eyes closed. It seems it has always been like this: the two of us in this sunless room, the splashing of the bathwater.

In the afternoons when she has rested, she prepares our ritual of tea and rice,   garnished with a shred of gingered fish, a slice of pickled turnip, a token for my white body.   

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We eat in the familiar silence. She knows I am not to be trusted,   even now planning my escape.   As I toast to her health with the tea she has poured, a thousand cranes curtain the window, fly up in a sudden breeze.

Cathy Song, “The Youngest Daughter” from Picture Bride. Copyright © 1983 by Cathy Song. Reprinted with the permission of Yale University Press.

“On Being Brought from Africa to America” By: Phillis Wheatley – p. BC-C

'Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,

Taught my benighted soul to understand

That there's a God, that there's a Saviour too:

Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.

Some view our sable race with scornful eye,

"Their colour is a diabolic die."

Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,

May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train.

“When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” By: Walt Whitman- p. 1352

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When I heard the learn’d astronomer,

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,

When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,

When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause

in the lecture-room,

How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,

Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

“A Late Aubade” by: Richard Wilbur- p.846

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You could be sitting now in a carrelTurning some liver-spotted page,Or rising in an elevator-cageToward Ladies' Apparel.

You could be planting a raucous bedOf salvia, in rubber gloves,Or lunching through a screed of someone's lovesWith pitying head.

Or making some unhappy setterHeel, or listening to a bleakLecture on Schoenberg's serial technique.Isn't this better?

Think of all the time you are notWasting, and would not care to waste,Such things, thank God, not being to your taste.Think what a lot

Of time, by woman's reckoning,You've saved, and so may spend on this,You who had rather lie in bed and kissThan anything.

It's almost noon, you say? If so,Time flies, and I need not rehearseThe rosebuds-theme of centuries of verse.If you mustgo,

Wait for a while, then slip downstairsAnd bring us up some chilled white wine,And some blue cheese, and crackers, and some fineRuddy-skinned pears.

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“This Is Just To Say” By: William Carlos Williams –p. 1353

I have eatenthe plumsthat were inthe icebox

and whichyou were probablysavingfor breakfast

Forgive methey were deliciousso sweetand so cold

Copyright © 1962 by William Carlos Williams. Used with permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

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“The World Is Too Much With Us” By:William Wordsworth – p. 1009

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

The winds that will be howling at all hours,

And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;

For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

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“Sailing to Byzantium” By: William Butler Yeats – p. 1359

I

That is no country for old men. The young In one another's arms, birds in the trees, —Those dying generations—at their song, The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas, Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long Whatever is begotten, born, and dies. Caught in that sensual music all neglect Monuments of unageing intellect.

II

An aged man is but a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick, unless Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing For every tatter in its mortal dress, Nor is there singing school but studying Monuments of its own magnificence; And therefore I have sailed the seas and come To the holy city of Byzantium.

III

O sages standing in God's holy fire As in the gold mosaic of a wall, Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre, And be the singing-masters of my soul. Consume my heart away; sick with desire And fastened to a dying animal It knows not what it is; and gather me Into the artifice of eternity.

IV

Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make Of hammered gold and gold enamelling To keep a drowsy Emperor awake; Or set upon a golden bough to sing To lords and ladies of Byzantium Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

W. B. Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium” from The Poems of W. B. Yeats: A New Edition, edited by Richard J. Finneran. Copyright 1933 by Macmillan Publishing Company, renewed © 1961 by Georgie Yeats

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SUPPLEMENTAL POEMS THESE POEMS CAN ONLY BE USED FOR YOUR COMPARE/CONTRAST RESPONSE IN CONJUNCTION WITH ANOTHER ASSIGNED POEM OR ANOTHER LITERARY WORK OF

MERIT. YOU CAN NOT USE THEM AS THE PRIMARY POEM FOR A RESPONSE.

“Mirror” Sylvia Plath- p. 912

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.

Whatever I see I swallow immediatelyJust 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

longI think it is part of my heart. But it flickers.Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,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.Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old womanRises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

“Player Piano” By: John Updike

My stick fingers click with a snickerAnd, chuckling, they knuckle the keys;Light footed, my steel feelers flickerAnd pluck from these keys melodies.

My paper can caper; abandonIs broadcast by dint of my din,And no man or band has a hand inThe tones I turn on from within.

At times I'm a jumble of rumbles,At others I'm light like the moon,But never my numb plunker fumbles,

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Misstrums me, or tries a new tune.

“Invictus” by: William Ernest Henley

Out of the night that covers me,       Black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be       For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance       I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance       My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears       Looms but the Horror of the shade, And yet the menace of the years       Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,       How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate,       I am the captain of my soul.

Two Poems by Langston Hughes

“Harlem” What happens to a dream deferred?

      Does it dry up       like a raisin in the sun?       Or fester like a sore—       And then run?       Does it stink like rotten meat?       Or crust and sugar over—       like a syrupy sweet?

      Maybe it just sags       like a heavy load.

      Or does it explode?

33

“Formula”

Poetry should treatOf lofty thingsSoaring thoughtsAnd birds with wings.

The Muse of PoetryShould not knowThat rosesIn manure grow.

The Muse of PoetryShould not careThat earthly painIs everywhere.

Poetry!Treats of lofty thingsSoaring thoughtsAnd birds with wings.