Poets From The United States

"'I bound her to me in all soft ways, I bound her to me in a net of days, Yet now she has gone in silence and said no word. How can we face these dazzling things, I ask you? There is no use: we cry: and are not heard."

"My veins are afire with music, Her eyes have kissed me, my body is turned to light; I shall dream to her secret heart tonight..."

"Weave, weave, weave, you streaks of rain! I am dissolved and woven again... Thousands of faces rise and vanish before me. Thousands of voices weave in the rain."

"'I am the one you saw to-day, who fell Senseless before you, hearing a certain bell: A bell that broke great memories in my brain.' 'I am the one who passed unnoticed before you, Invisible, in a cloud of secret pain.'"

"'I am the one who stood beside you and smiled, Thinking your face so strangely young . . . ' 'I am the one who loved you but did not dare.'"

"A chorus of elfin voices blowing about me Weaves to a babel of sound. Each cries a secret. I run among them, reach out vain hands, and drown."

"Over the darkened city, the city of towers, The city of a thousand gates, Over the gleaming terraced roofs, the huddled towers, Over a somnolent whisper of loves and hates, The slow wind flows, drearily streams and falls, With a mournful sound down rain-dark walls."

"And, growing tired, we turn aside at last, Remember our secret selves, seek out our towers, Lay weary hands on the banisters, and climb; Climbing, each, to his little four-square dream Of love or lust or beauty or death or crime."

"And we recall, with a gleaming stab of sadness, Vaguely and incoherently, some dream Of a world we came from, a world of sun-blue hills . . . A black wood whispers around us, green eyes gleam; Someone cries in the forest, and someone kills."

"One of us sings in the street, and we listen to him; The words ring over us like vague bells of sorrow. He sings of a house he lived in long ago. It is strange; this house of dust was the house I lived in; The house you lived in, the house that all of us know."

"We were all born of flesh, in a flare of pain, We do not remember the red roots whence we rose, But we know that we rose and walked, that after a while We shall lie down again."

"And there was one, beneath black eaves, who thought, Combing with lifted arms her golden hair, Of the lover who hurried towards her through the night; And there was one who dreamed of a sudden death As she blew out her light."

"From some, the light was scarcely more than a gloom: From some, a dazzling desire."

"From high black walls, gleaming vaguely with rain, Each yellow light looked down like a golden eye. They trembled from coign to coign, and tower to tower, Along high terraces quicker than dream they flew. And some of them steadily glowed, and some soon vanished, And some strange shadows threw."

"Before him, numberless lovers smiled and talked. And death was observed with sudden cries, And birth with laughter and pain. And the trees grew taller and blacker against the skies And night came down again."

"There, in the high bright window he dreams, and sees What we are blind to,—we who mass and crowd From wall to wall in the darkening of a cloud."

"What did we build it for? Was it all a dream? . . . Ghostly above us in lamplight the towers gleam . . . And after a while they will fall to dust and rain; Or else we will tear them down with impatient hands; And hew rock out of the earth, and build them again."

"Our hands are hot and raw with the stones we have laid, We have built a tower of stone high into the sky, We have built a city of towers."

"We flow, we descend, we turn . . . and the eternal dreamer Moves among us like light, like evening air . . ."

"'I will ask them all, I will ask them all their dreams, I will hold my light above them and seek their faces. I will hear them whisper, invisible in their veins . . .' The eternal asker of answers becomes as the darkness, Or as a wind blown over a myriad forest, Or as the numberless voices of long-drawn rains."

"The wandering one, the inquisitive dreamer of dreams, The eternal asker of answers, stands in the street, And lifts his palms for the first cold ghost of rain."

"Come back, true love! Sweet youth, return!— But time goes on, and will, unheeding, Though hands will reach, and eyes will yearn, And the wild days set true hearts bleeding."

"All lovely things will have an ending, All lovely things will fade and die, And youth, that's now so bravely spending, Will beg a penny by and by."

"O sweet clean earth, from whom the green blade cometh! When we are dead, my best belovèd and I, Close well above us, that we may rest forever, Sending up grass and blossoms to the sky."

"My heart is torn with the sound of raucous voices, They shout from the slums, from the streets, from the crowded places, And tunes from the hurdy-gurdy that coldly rejoices Shoot arrows into my heart."

"My heart has become as hard as a city street, The horses trample upon it, it sings like iron, All day long and all night long they beat, They ring like the hooves of time."

"Music I heard with you was more than music, And bread I broke with you was more than bread; Now that I am without you, all is desolate; All that was once so beautiful is dead."

"Separate we come and separate we go, And this, be it known, is all that we know."

"Walk with me world, upon my right hand walk, speak to me Babel, that I may strive to assemble of all these syllables a single word before the purpose of speech is gone."

"Another founding mother was the American Emma Lazarus, who was affected as much by her country's civil war as by the Russian pogroms in the late nineteenth century...Lazarus perceived herself as a Sephardic Jew, but she didn't want to isolate herself from the contemporary American literary community. When her friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson failed to include her poems in his anthology Parnassus (1874), which included works by prominent and promising national poets, Lazarus wrote him an angry letter. "I cannot resist the impulse of expressing to you my extreme disappointment at finding you have so far modified the enthusiastic estimate you held of my literary labors as to refuse me a place in the large & miscellaneous collection of poems you have just edited," she wrote. And so, she wondered why "I find myself treated with absolute contempt in the very quarter where I had been encouraged to build my fondest hopes." Her letter to Emerson might be read in at least two ways: as a woman's angry response to the "arbitrary" exclusion by a prominent male critic and essayist from "a fair share of immortality"; and as the response by a Jew, as a member of an ethnic and religious minority, who felt that she had been discriminated against. It is interesting, therefore, to note that Lazarus sought to introduce American readers to figures such as Bar Kokhba, the Jewish soldier who led the final revolt against the Romans in Palestine in 132-35 CE, and to Rashi, the twelfth-century biblical and talmudic commentator from Troyes, France. She also wrote a poem about the Touro Synagogue, the famous Sephardic house of worship that was established in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1763. In addition to translating into English the poetry of the popular German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, Lazarus also translated poems by Ibn Gabirol, Halevi, and Ibn Ezra, thus building a bridge between Sephardic life in the United States and the medieval Hebrew past."

"The Jewish problem is as old as history and assumes in each age a new form. All the magnanimity, patience, charity, and humanity, which the Jews have manifested in return for centuries of persecution, have been thus far inadequate to eradicate the profound antipathy engendered by fanaticism and ready to break out in one or another shape at any moment of popular excitement."

"Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

"Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles."

"Lo — a black line of birds in wavering thread Bore him the greetings of the deathless dead!"

"A lady 'twixt two knights' stone effigies, And every day in dusky glory steeps Their sculptured slumber of five centuries."

"The funeral and the marriage, now, alas! We know not which is sadder to recall."

"Alas! we wake: one scene alone remains, — The exiles by the streams of Babylon."

"No signs of life are here: the very prayers Inscribed around are in a language dead."

"No man had ever heard a nightingale, When once a keen-eyed naturalist was stirred To study and define — what is a bird."

"Then Nature shaped a poet's heart — a lyre From out whose chords the lightest breeze that blows Drew trembling music."

"The children of the prophets of the Lord, Prince, priest, and people, spurned by zealot hate. Hounded from sea to sea, from state to state, The West refused them, and the East abhorred. No anchorage the known world could afford."

"Sweet empty sky of June without a stain, Faint, gray-blue dewy mists on far-off hills Warm, yellow sunlight flooding mead and plain, That each dark copse and hollow overfills:"

"Poetry must be simple, sensuous, or impassioned."

"I seem to have always one little window looking but into life."

"Anne Bradstreet's sweet-tempered moderation can be read as ironic or conformist, but the significant fact is that she persisted all her life in working and publishing as a poet. At what cost to herself and her art can only be surmised. As Adrienne Rich observed: "To have written poems, the first good poems in America, while rearing eight children, lying frequently sick, keeping house at the edge of wilderness, was to have managed a poet's range and extension within confines as severe as any American poet has confronted.""

"Anne Bradstreet wrote seven thousand lines of verse and most of it is derivative, unremarkable, sometimes even soporific, although her best is very good indeed; and her real achievements in poetry have not been duly recognized for almost three hundred years. But in greatness of spirit, generosity of outlook, love for learning as a path toward truth; in their quick responsive delight in the everyday wonder of the world and their deeply devout faith in the goodness of God, Anne Bradstreet and Juana Inés de la Cruz-the one a Puritan, the other a Roman Catholic-were very close akin. Remarking upon the brevity of human life, Anne Bradstreet wrote, "And though thus short, we shorten many ways, / Living so little while we are alive"; and Sor Juana said, "Angels are higher than men because they understand more.""

"Fire hath its force abated by water, not by wind; and anger must be allayed by cold words, and not by blustering threats."

"If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant: if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome."

"Authority without wisdom is like a heavy axe without an edge, fitter to bruise than polish."

"Youth is the time of getting, middle age of improving, and old age of spending."