The Giant Book of Poetry Read online

  The Giant Book of Poetry

  William H. Roetzheim, Editor

  Copyright acknowledgements for poems contained in this work are contained in the acknowledgement section at the end of this work, which shall be considered an extension of this copyright page.

  The special contents of this edition

  are Copyright © 2006 by William H. Roetzheim

  This book was illustrated by

  William H. Roetzheim

  The author would like to thank Chris McDonald for assistance researching author dates of birth and Marshall Harvey for help with copyediting the manuscript.

  Published by Level Four Press, 13518 Jamul Drive,

  Jamul, CA 91935-1635 USA.

  www.Level4Press.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  The Giant Book of Poetry

  edited by William H. Roetzheim

  p. cm.

  1. Poetry 2. English poetry. 3. American Poetry. I. Roetzheim, William H.

  Library of Congress Control Number:2005903197

  This book is printed on acid-neutral archival Quality paper.

  Printed and bound in the Canada.

  Dedication

  To my wife Marianne—

  our relationship is the poetry that matters.

  Table of Contents

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  Level Four Poetry Manifesto

  Organization of the Poems

  A Note on Meter

  A Request for Understanding and Assistance

  Poems

  Unknown (possibly 4,000 BC)

  Ishtar

  Archilochos (circa 700 BC – 650 BC)

  Will, lost in a sea of trouble

  The Bible

  Address of Ruth to Naomi

  Mei Sheng (Circe 140 BC)

  The Beautiful Toilet

  Horace (65 BC – 8 BC)

  The young bloods come less often now

  Norse Myth (circa 50 BC)

  from The Longbeards’ Saga

  Petronius Arbiter (27 AD – 66 AD)

  Doing, a filthy pleasure is, and short

  Tao Yuan-ming (To-Em-Mei) (365-427)

  The Unmoving Cloud

  Li Po (701 – 762)

  The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter

  Omar Khayam (1044-1123)

  XI

  XXIII

  XXVIII

  LI

  Moritake (1452 – 1540)

  One fallen flower

  Sir Philip Sidney (1554 – 1586)

  A Ditty

  Be Your Words Made, Good Sir of Indian Ware

  Loving in Truth

  To Sleep

  Robert Greene (1560 – 1592)

  Content

  Michael Drayton (1563-1631)

  Love’s Farewell

  William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

  All the World’s a Stage

  Sonnet XVII

  Sonnet XVIII

  Sonnet XXXII

  Sonnet LV

  Sonnet CXXX

  Sonnet CXXXVIII

  Sonnet CXLIII

  Sonnet CXLVII

  Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

  Thomas Campion (1567 – 1619)

  Integer Vitae

  Sir Henry Wotton (1568 – 1639)

  Upon the Death of Sir Albert Morton′s Wife

  John Donne (1572-1631)

  Community

  Confined Love

  Death

  The Computation

  The Curse

  William Drummond (1585 – 1649)

  Life

  Robert Herrick (1591 – 1674)

  To the Virgins

  Upon Julia’s Clothes

  Thomas Carew (1595 – 1639)

  Ingrateful Beauty Threatened

  John Milton (1608 – 1674)

  On His Blindness

  Sir John Suckling (1609 – 1642)

  Song: Why so pale and wan, fond lover?

  Abraham Cowley (1618 – 1667)

  Drinking

  Richard Lovelace (1618 – 1658)

  To Lucasta, On Going to the Wars

  William Walsh (1663 – 1708)

  Love and Jealousy

  William Congreve (1670 – 1729)

  False though she be to me and love

  Ryusui (1691 – 1758)

  A lost child crying

  Jokun (circa 1700)

  Ah! I intended

  William Blake (1757 - 1827)

  The Garden of Love

  The Sick Rose

  The Tiger

  To See a World in a Grain of Sand

  Robert Burns (1759 1796)

  Epitaph for James Smith

  Epitaph on a Henpecked SQuire

  Epitaph on William Muir

  Inconstancy in love

  To A Louse

  To A Mountain Daisy

  William Wordsworth (1770 – 1850)

  I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud

  Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room

  The Solitary Reaper

  We are Seven

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 – 1834)

  The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

  Robert Southey (1774 – 1843)

  After Blenheim

  The Scholar

  Walter Savage Landor (1775 – 1864)

  On His Seventy-Fifth Birthday

  Well I Remember

  Thomas Moore (1779 – 1852)

  An Argument

  ‘Tis the Last Rose of Summer

  George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788 – 1824)

  She Walks in Beauty

  So, we’ll go no more a-roving

  Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 – 1822)

  Music

  Mutability

  Song from Charles the First

  Ozymandias

  John Clare (1793 – 1864)

  Badger

  William Cullen Bryant (1794 – 1878)

  A Presentiment

  Mutation

  Thanatopsis

  The Hurricane

  The Murdered Traveler

  The Poet

  The Strange Lady

  To a Waterfowl

  John Keats (1795 – 1821)

  Isabella

  La Belle Dame Sans Merci

  O Blush Not So

  This living hand, now warm and capable 1

  Ode on a Grecian Urn

  Thomas Hood (1799 – 1845)

  The Poet’s Fate

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882)

  Days

  Hamatreya

  The Rhodora

  The Snow-Storm

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806 – 1861)

  Sonnets from the Portuguese – I

  Sonnets from the Portuguese – XIV

  Sonnets from the Portuguese – XX

  Sonnets from the Portuguese – XLIII

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807 – 1882)

  A Nameless Grave

  Jugurtha

  Killed at the Ford

  King Witlaf’s Drinking-Horn

  Nature

  The Beleaguered City

  The Fire of Drift-Wood

  The Landlord’s Tale

  The Phantom Ship

  The Potter’s Wheel

  The Rainy Day

  The Three Silences of Molinos

  Travels by the Fireside

  Twilight

  John Greenleaf Whittier (1807 – 1892)

  Autumn Thoughts

  By their Works

  Forgiveness

  Trust

  Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809 – 1894)

  Sun and Shadow

  Edgar Allan Poe (1809 – 1849) />
  Annabel Lee

  For Annie

  The Raven

  Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809 – 1892)

  Come Not, When I am Dead

  Home They Brought Her Warrior Dead

  The Charge of the Light Brigade

  Vivien’s Song

  Robert Browning (1812 – 1889)

  A Toccata of Galuppi’s

  Meeting at Night

  My Last Duchess

  Never the Time and the Place

  Porphyria’s Lover

  The Confessional

  The Pied Piper of Hamelin

  Edward Lear (1812 – 1888)

  The Owl and the Pussy-Cat

  Emily Bronte (1818 – 1848)

  I am the Only Being Whose Doom

  Charles Kingsley (1819 – 1875)

  Young and Old

  Walt Whitman (1819 – 1892)

  Darest Thou Now O Soul

  I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing

  My Legacy

  O Captain! My Captain

  Song of Prudence

  This Compost

  When I heard the Learn’d Astronomer

  Charles Baudelaire (1821 – 1867)

  A Carrion

  from Fuses I – on Love

  from Fuses I – on Art

  from Fuses I – on God

  Heautontimoroumenos

  Metamorphoses of the Vampire

  Spleen

  The Flask

  The Ghostly Visitant

  The Murderer’s Wine

  The Pit

  The Vampire

  Coventry Patmore (1823 – 1896)

  The Toys

  Richard Henry Stoddard (1805 – 1923)

  The Jar

  Emily Dickinson (1830 – 1886)

  A deed knocks first at thought

  A narrow fellow in the grass

  A word is dead

  After great pain a formal feeling comes

  Apparently with no surprise

  Because I could not stop for death

  Hope is the thing with feathers

  I felt a funeral in my brain

  I had been hungry all the years

  I heard a fly buzz when I died

  I like to see it lap the miles

  I taste a liQuor never brewed

  I’m nobody! Who are you?

  I’ve Known a Heaven, Like a Tent

  My life closed twice before its close

  The Last Night

  The Props Assist the House

  The way I read a letter’s this

  There came a wind like a bugle

  There’s a certain slant of light

  To make a prairie it takes a clover

  We Grow Accustomed to the Dark

  Wild nights! Wild nights!

  Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830 – 1894)

  Goblin Market

  Remember

  Song

  The First Day

  Lewis Carroll (1832 – 1898)

  The Walrus and the Carpenter

  Thomas Hardy (1840 – 1928)

  Channel firing

  I look into my glass

  The oxen

  The Ruined Maid

  Sidney Lanier (1842 – 1881)

  The Revenge of Hamish

  The Waving of the Corn

  To Nannette Falk-Auerbach

  Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844 – 1889)

  Binsey Poplars

  Carrion Comfort

  Spring and Fall

  The Windhover

  Edward Rowland Sill (1847 – 1881)

  Five Lives

  William Ernest Henley (1849 – 1903)

  Invictus

  Eugene Field (1850 – 1895)

  Little Boy Blue

  Wynken, Blynken, and Nod

  Robert Louis Stevenson (1850 – 1894)

  Requiem

  Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850 – 1919)

  Solitude

  A.E. Housman (1859 – 1936)

  Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

  Terence, This is Stupid Stuff

  They say my Verse is Sad: No Wonder

  To an Athlete Dying Young

  James B Naylor (1860 – 1902)

  Authorship

  Charles Perkins Stetson (1860 – 1935)

  An Obstacle

  Black Elk (1863 – 1950)

  Everything the Power of the World Does is done in a circle

  Rudyard Kipling (1865 – 1930)

  If

  The Way Through the Woods

  We and They

  William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939)

  A Dream of Death

  Politics

  The Ballad of Father Gilligan

  The Indian upon God

  The Sad Shepherd

  Shiki (Masaoka Tseunenori) (1867 – 1902)

  By that fallen house

  Edgar Lee Masters (1868 – 1950)

  Alexander Throckmorton

  Aner Clute

  Conrad Siever

  Fiddler Jones

  Silas Dement

  Tom Beatty

  Roka (1868 – 1927)

  Winter rain deepens

  Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869 – 1935)

  Amaryllis

  An Old Story

  Haunted House

  John Evereldown

  Karma

  Mr. Flood's Party

  Reuben Bright

  Richard Cory

  Souvenir

  Supremacy

  The Dead Village

  The Growth of “Lorraine”

  The Mill

  The Pity of the Leaves

  The Sheaves

  The Tavern

  Stephen Crane (1871 – 1900)

  In the desert

  W.H. Davies (1871 – 1940)

  Leisure

  Robert Frost (1874 – 1963)

  “Out, Out—”

  A Brook in the City

  A Dream Pang

  A Fountain, a Bottle, a Donkey's Ears, and Some Books

  A Late Walk

  After Apple-Picking

  An Old Man’s Winter Night

  Birches

  Death of the Hired Man

  Fire and Ice

  For Once, Then, Something

  Good-by and Keep Cold

  Home Burial

  In a Disused Graveyard

  Into My Own

  Mending Wall

  Misgiving

  On a Tree Fallen Across the Road

  Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

  Storm Fear

  The Aim was Song

  The Need of Being Versed in Country Things

  The Onset

  The Road Not Taken

  The Vantage Point

  The Wood-Pile

  Amy Lowell (1874 – 1925)

  A Decade

  New Heavens for Old

  Patterns

  Robert Service (1874 – 1958)

  Just Think!

  Lost

  My Madonna

  On the Wire

  The Ballad of Pious Pete

  The Ballad of the Black Fox Skin

  The Cremation of Sam McGee

  The Shooting of Dan McGrew

  The Smoking Frog

  The Soldier of Fortune

  The Wee Shop

  Gertrude Stein (1874 – 1946)

  from Idem the Same, A Valentine to Sherwood Anderson, A Very Valentine

  Carl Sandburg (1878 – 1967)

  Last Answers

  The Junk Man

  To Know Silence Perfectly

  Vachel Lindsay (1879 – 1931)

  The Horrid Voice of Science

  Wallace Stevens (1879 – 1955)

  The Snow Man

  Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

  Marjorie Allen Seiffert (1881 – 1968)

  Cubist Portrait

  William Carlos Williams (1883 – 1963)

  Danse Russe

  The Act

  The Last Words of My
English Grandmother

  The Red Wheelbarrow

  The Three Graces

  To Mark Anthony in Heaven

  This is Just to Say

  Tract

  Sara Teasdale (1884 – 1933)

  There will come soft rains

  D.H. Lawrence (1885 – 1930)

  From The Ship of Death

  New Year’s Eve

  Snake

  Ezra Pound (1885 – 1972)

  A Pact

  Francesca

  In a Station of the Metro

  Lustra (from the Introduction)

  Tame Cat

  Salutation

  The Eyes

  The Garden

  The Plunge

  The Tree

  Louis Untermeyer (1885 – 1972)

  Long Feud

  Rupert Brooke (1887 – 1915)

  The Soldier

  Robinson Jeffers (1887 – 1962)

  Fawn’s Foster-Mother

  Joyce Kilmer (1887 – 1918)

  Trees

  Marianne Moore (1887 – 1972)

  I May, I Might, I Must

  Injudicious Gardening

  Poetry

  To a Steam Roller

  T.S. Eliot (1888 – 1965)

  Rhapsody on a Windy Night

  The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

  Hysteria

  Anna Akhmatova (1889 – 1966)

  ReQuiem – Instead of a Preface

  Archibald MacLeish (1892 – 1982)

  Ars Poetica

  Not Marble nor the Gilded Monuments

  Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892 – 1950)

  First Fig

  Wilfred Owen (1893 – 1918)

  Dulce et Decorum Est

  Lucian Blaga (1895 – 1961)

  I will not crush the world’s corolla of wonders

  Miyazawa Kenji (1896 – 1933)

  Daydreaming on the Trail

  Louise Bogan (1897 – 1970)

  from Beginning and End—Knowledge

  Ernest Hemingway (1899 – 1960)

  from Wanderings — Chapter Heading

  Wen I-to (1899 – 1946)

  Dead Water

  Anonymous

  The Anvil—God’s Word

  Langston Hughes (1902 – 1967)

  Dream Deferred: Harlem

  Evil

  Maybe

  Suicide’s Note

  Stevie Smith (1902 – 1983)

  Not Waving but Drowning

  Sunt Leones

  W.H. Auden (1907 – 1973)

  Dichtung and Wahrheit

  From Selected Shorts

  Marginalia (Extracts)

  Zawgee (1907 – 1973)

  The Way of the Water-Hyacinth

  Elizabeth Bishop (1911 – 1979)

  Filling Station

  In the Waiting Room

  One Art

  Sestina

  The Armadillo

  May Swenson (1913 – 1989)

  A Couple

  David Ignatow (1914 – 1997)

  The Bagel

  Randall Jarrell (1914 – 1965)

  Bats

  Next Day

  The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner

  William Stafford (1914 – 1993)

  Traveling Through the Dark

  Dylan Thomas (1914 – 1953)

  Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night

  Robert Lax (1915 – 2000)

  Alley Violinist

  Gwendolyn Brooks (1917 – 2000)