magiadoreal

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both... ........................................................ ........................................................ I took the one last travelled by and that has made all the difference Dois caminhos divergiam num bosque de outono E, que pena, não pude seguir por ambos............. ............................................................................. ............................................................................ Tomei o menos trilhado, e isso fez toda a diferença.

I used to mock my father and his chums for getting up early on Sunday morning and drinking coffee at a local spot but now I’m one of those chumps. No one cares about my old humiliations but they go on dragging through my sleep like a string of empty tin cans rattling behind an abandoned car. It’s like this: just when you think you have forgotten that red-haired girl who left you stranded in a parking lot forty years ago, you wake up early enough to see her disappearing around the corner of your dream on someone else’s motorcycle roaring onto the highway at sunrise. And so now I’m sitting in a dimly lit café full of early morning risers where the windows are covered with soot and the coffee is warm and bitter.

In the early fall of 1912, a blandly handsome, tousle-headed American schoolteacher arrived in London. Nearing 40, coming without introduction or much of a plan — except, as he later confessed, “to write and be poor” — he was making a last attempt to write himself into poetry. It would have taken mad willfulness to drag his wife and four children out of their ­settled New Hampshire life in a quixotic assault on the London literary scene. Still, he was soon spending a candlelit evening with Yeats in the poet’s curtained rooms, having come to the attention of that “stormy petrel” Ezra Pound, who lauded him in reviews back home. Little more than two years later, the schoolteacher sailed back, having published his first two books , “A Boy’s Will” (1913) and “North of Boston” (1914). He had become Robert Frost. The modernists remade American poetry in less than a decade, but like the Romantics they were less a group than a scatter of ill-favored and sometimes ill-tem...

Only teaching on Tuesdays, book-worming in pajamas fresh from the washer each morning, I hog a whole house on Boston’s “hardly passionate Marlborough Street,” where even the man scavenging filth in the back alley trash cans, has two children, a beach wagon, a helpmate, and is a “young Republican.” I have a nine months’ daughter, young enough to be my granddaughter. Like the sun she rises in her flame-flamingo infants’ wear. These are the tranquillized Fifties, and I am forty. Ought I to regret my seedtime?    I was a fire-breathing Catholic C.O., and made my manic statement, telling off the state and president, and then    sat waiting sentence in the bull pen beside a Negro boy with curlicues of marijuana in his hair. Given a year, I walked on the roof of the West Street Jail, a short    enclosure like my school soccer court,    and saw the Hudson...

Because I could not stop for Death, He kindly stopped for me; The carriage held but just ourselves And Immortality. We slowly drove, he knew no haste, And I had put away My labor, and my leisure too, For his civility. We passed the school, where children strove At recess, in the ring; We passed the fields of gazing grain, We passed the setting sun. Or rather, he passed us; The dews grew quivering and chill, For only gossamer my gown, My tippet only tulle. We paused before a house that seemed A swelling of the ground; The roof was scarcely visible, The cornice but a mound. Since then 'tis centuries, and yet each Feels shorter than the day I first surmised the horses' heads Were toward eternity.

Jesús, Estrella, Esperanza, Mercy:        Sails flashing to the wind like weapons,        sharks following the moans the fever and the dying;           horror the corposant and compass rose. Middle Passage:                voyage through death                                to life upon these shores.        “10 April 1800—        Blacks rebellious. Crew uneasy. Our linguist says           their moaning is a prayer for death,        ours and their own. Some try to starve themselves.    ...

  by  Elizabeth Bishop The art of losing isn't hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn't hard to master. Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster. I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went. The art of losing isn't hard to master. I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster. —Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident the art of losing's not too hard to master though it may look like ( Write it!) like disaster.

Wallace Stevens She sang beyond the genius of the sea. The water never formed to mind or voice, Like a body wholly body, fluttering Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry, That was not ours although we understood, Inhuman, of the veritable ocean. The sea was not a mask. No more was she. The song and water were not medleyed sound Even if what she sang was what she heard, Since what she sang was uttered word by word. It may be that in all her phrases stirred The grinding water and the gasping wind; But it was she and not the sea we heard. For she was the maker of the song she sang. The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea Was merely a place by which she walked to sing. Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew It was the spirit that we sought and knew That we should ask this often as she sang. If it was only the dark voice of the sea That rose, or even colored by many waves; If it was only the outer voice of sky And cloud, of the sun...

The list could go on and on, but these are the poems that seem to me to have left the deepest mark on US literature – and me 1 mail Engraving of Walt Whitman by George C Cox. Image: Bettmann/Corbis For whatever reason, I woke up today with a list of the 10 greatest American poems in my head that had been accumulating through the night. Every list is subjective, and of course the use of "greatest" even more so - but these are not just "favorite" poems. I've been thinking about American  poetry  - and teaching it to university students - for nearly 40 years, and these are the 10 poems that, in my own reading life, have seemed the most durable; poems that shifted the course of poetry in the United States, as well as poems that I look forward to teaching every year because they represent something indelible. The list could go on and on, of course. I deeply regret leaving off Roethke's "The Lost Son", Adrienne Rich's "...

CITY of ships! (O the black ships! O the fierce ships! O the beautiful sharp-bow'd steam-ships and sail-ships!) City of the world! (for all races are here, All the lands of the earth make contributions here;) City of the sea! city of hurried and glittering tides! City whose gleeful tides continually rush or recede, whirling in and out with eddies and foam! City of wharves and stores- city of tall facades of marble and iron! Proud and passionate city- mettlesome, mad, extravagant city! Spring up O city- not for peace alone, but be indeed yourself, warlike! Fear not- submit to no models but your own O city! Behold me- incarnate me as I have incarnated you! I have rejected nothing you offer'd me-whom you adopted I have adopted, Good or bad I never question you- I love all- I do not condemn any...

Children picking up our bones Will never know that these were once As quick as foxes on the hill; And that in autumn, when the grapes Made sharp air sharper by their smell These had a being, breathing frost; And least will guess that with our bones We left much more, left what still is The look of things, left what we felt At what we saw. The spring clouds blow Above the shuttered mansion house, Beyond our gate and the windy sky Cries out a literate despair. We knew for long the mansion's look And what we said of it became A part of what it is ... Children, Still weaving budded aureoles, Will speak our speech and never know, Will say of the mansion that it seems As if he that lived there left behind A spirit storming in blank walls, A dirty house in a gutted world, A tatter of shadows peaked to white, Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.  Wallace Stevens

A Grave   by  Marianne Moore Man looking into the sea, taking the view from those who have as much right to it as you have to yourself, it is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing, but you cannot stand in the middle of this; the sea has nothing to give but a well excavated grave. The firs stand in a procession, each with an emerald turkey-foot at the top, reserved as their contours, saying nothing; repression, however, is not the most obvious characteristic of the sea; the sea is a collector, quick to return a rapacious look. There are others besides you who have worn that look-- whose expression is no longer a protest; the fish no longer investigate them for their bones have not lasted: men lower nets, unconscious of the fact that they are desecrating a grave, and row quickly away--the blades of the oars moving together like the feet of water-spiders as if there were no such thing as death. The wrinkles progress among the...

I have tried to write Paradise Do not move Let the wind speak that is paradise. Let the gods forgive what I have made Let those I love try to forgive what I have made. Ezra Pound

  We make our meek adjustments, Contented with such random consolations As the wind deposits In slithered and too ample pockets. For we can still love the world, who find A famished kitten on the step, and know Recesses for it from the fury of the street, Or warm torn elbow coverts. We will sidestep, and to the final smirk Dally the doom of that inevitable thumb That slowly chafes its puckered index toward us, Facing the dull squint with what innocence And what surprise! And yet these fine collapses are not lies More than the pirouettes of any pliant cane; Our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise. We can evade you, and all else but the heart: What blame to us if the heart live on. The game enforces smirks; but we have seen The moon in lonely alleys make A grail of laughter of an empty ash can, And through all sound of gaiety and quest Have heard a kitten in the wilderness.