While reviled by many for his commercial pragmatism concerning the sale of his work, Frost remains the most beloved of American poets, and, until recently, the top grossing. His "box office record" was finally broken in 1997 by a fledgling poet...named Jewel.

        Whose woods these are I think I know.
	His house is in the village, though;
	He will not see me stopping here
	To watch his woods fill up with snow.
 
	My little horse must think it queer
	To stop without a farmhouse near
	Between the woods and frozen lake
	The darkest evening of the year.
 
	He gives his harness bells a shake
	To ask if there is some mistake.
	The only other sound's the sweep
	Of easy wind and downy flake.
 
	The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
	But I have promises to keep,
	And miles to go before I sleep,
	And miles to go before I sleep.





This poem is to commemorate the battle of the croppies, Irish rebels of 1798. 
The term "Croppies" referred to their short, cropped hair.
 It is from the viewpoint of the dead soldiers, and is striking in its language.



Requiem For the Croppies
Seamus Heaney (1939-)


The pockets of our greatcoats full of barley -
No kitchens on the run, no striking camp -
We moved quick and sudden in our own country
The priest lay behind ditches with the tramp.

A people, hardly marching - on the hike -
We found new tactics happening each day:
We’d cut through reins and rider with the pike
And stampede cattle into infantry,
Then retreat through hedges where cavalry must be thrown.

Until, on Vinegar Hill, the fatal conclave.
Terraced thousands died, shaking scythes at cannon.
The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave.
They buried us without shroud or coffin
And in August the barley grew up out of the grave.




This work, though short is filled with dreamlike, disturbing 
images of war, that suggest the horror of combat without trying to 
realistically describe it. In its tone and rythm, it is remarkably similar to
 Requiem For the Croppies.

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
Randall Jarrell (1914-1965) 

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, I 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. 


In this poem, Robert Lowell sets forth with remarkable clarity 
the loss of value and absence of meaning that his generation of creative
 minds felt in the cultural waste that was left after WWII. 

 Robert Lowell (1917 - 1977)


Skunk Hour
(for Elizabeth Bishop)


Nautilus Island's hermit
heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage;
her sheep still graze above the sea.
Her son's a bishop. Her farmer is first selectman in our village;
she's in her dotage. 

Thirsting for
the hierarchic privacy
of Queen Victoria's century
she buys up all
the eyesores facing her shore,
and lets them fall. 

The season's ill--
we've lost our summer millionaire,
who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean
catalogue. His nine-knot yawl
was auctioned off to lobstermen.
A red fox stain covers Blue Hill. 

And now our fairy
decorator brightens his shop for fall;
his fishnet's filled with orange cork,
orange, his cobbler's bench and awl;
there is no money in his work,
he'd rather marry. 

One dark night,
my Tudor Ford climbed the hill's skull;
I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down,
they lay together, hull to hull,
where the graveyard shelves on the town....
My mind's not right. 

A car radio bleats,
"Love, O careless Love...." I hear
my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,
as if my hand were at its throat...
I myself am hell;
nobody's here-- 

only skunks, that search
in the moonlight for a bite to eat.
They march on their soles up Main Street:
white stripes, moonstruck eyes' red fire
under the chalk-dry and spar spire
of the Trinitarian Church. 

I stand on top
of our back steps and breathe the rich air--
a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail.
She jabs her wedge-head in a cup
of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,
and will not scare.


A friend and close contemporary of Lowell's, Roethke (pronounced
RIT-key) was a true iconoclast, obsessed with desolation, decay and 
mutibility. He frequently writes of abandoned places and dejected themes.
Here, he seems in a lighter mood.


The Sloth 

by Theodore Roethke 
In moving-slow he has no Peer.
You ask him something in his Ear,
He thinks about it for a Year;

And, then, before he says a Word
There, upside down (unlike a Bird),
He will assume that you have Heard-

A most Ex-as-per-at-ing Lug.
But should you call his manner Smug,
He'll sigh and give his Branch a Hug;

Then off again to Sleep he goes,
Still swaying gently by his Toes,
And you just know he knows he knows





One of the greatest poets of our time, frequently mistaken for one of the
 
greatest black poets of our time, was Langston Hughes. His tone, is
 majestic, flowing, and at the same time possesses a confidence. His use of
 images incorporates the reader's memory and common knowledge to make the
 
poem function. The result is a trancendental ode, but one that anyone could
 understand.




Langston Hughes
The Negro Speaks of Rivers 

 
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.




W.B. Yeats may seem out of place here with the likes
 of Jarrell and Lowell; certainly, his experience
 was different--he belonged to a different
 generation, and a very different age in literature.

Generally, and quite rightly, recognized as the last
of the romantics, Yeats had it all--Metre, Rhyme,and 

figurative language at his command. After him came

T.S. Eliot, and it all was changed forever.

And so, my choice of the following.


 



The Second Coming
William Butler Yeats


Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming!  Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in ther sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?









...and there are many more that I might have included. Coming soon, you will be
 able to access some of my writing, as well as the writing of my friends,
 several of whom are writers themselves. Let us know what you think. Come visit
 Tim's Web again soon.