greykit.poetry — #1860s
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1890
[emily-dickinson]
Because I could not stop for Death—
Death comes as a courteous gentleman who drives the poet past schoolchildren at play, gazing grain, and a house that seems a swelling of the ground, until centuries feel shorter than a single day.
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1868
[walt-whitman]
A Noiseless Patient Spider
A spider on a promontory flinging filament out of itself into vacant space, and the soul doing the same — ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, till the gossamer thread catches somewhere.
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1866
[emily-dickinson]
A narrow fellow in the grass
A snake described entirely by how it moves and how it is missed — a whip lash unbraiding in the sun — and met, unlike Nature's other people, with tighter breathing and zero at the bone.
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1865
[walt-whitman]
O Captain! My Captain!
Whitman's elegy for Lincoln as fallen ship's captain — the voyage won and the port in sight, but the Captain lies cold and dead on the deck while the crowds exult on shore.
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1865
[walt-whitman]
When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd
Whitman's great elegy for Lincoln — the lilac's perennial bloom, the drooping western star, and the hermit thrush singing death's carol in the swamps; the poem that transformed a president's death into a national rite of mourning.
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1864
[robert-browning]
Prospice
Written after his wife's death: no wish for the bandage or the creeping past — he would fare like his peers, take the last worst of it fighting, and have the black minute end in her breast, and peace out of pain.
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1862
[christina-rossetti]
A Better Resurrection
No wit, no words, no tears; a heart like a stone, a faded leaf, a broken bowl — each stanza handing the ruin over to be remade: cast in the fire the perished thing, and melt and remould it.
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1862
[christina-rossetti]
Goblin Market
Laura succumbs to the goblin merchants' enchanted fruit and wastes away; her sister Lizzie braves the goblins to win the antidote and save her — a narrative poem of temptation, sacrifice, and the redemptive bond between sisters.
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1862
[christina-rossetti]
Remember
Rossetti urges her beloved to remember her after death, then revises the plea — better he should forget and smile than remember and be sad.
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1862
[christina-rossetti]
Up-Hill
A traveller's questions and a steady voice answering: the road winds uphill all the way, the journey takes the whole long day, and yes — there will be beds for all who come.
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1861
[christina-rossetti]
A Birthday
Rossetti's jubilant lyric — the heart like a singing bird, an apple tree, a rainbow shell — all gladder than all these, because the birthday of my life is come, my love is come to me.
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1861
[henry-wadsworth-longfellow]
Paul Revere’s Ride
One if by land, and two if by sea — the signal lanterns in the North Church tower, the muffled oars across the Charles, and the midnight gallop through Medford, Lexington and Concord that woke the countryside.
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1860
[walt-whitman]
I Hear America Singing
Whitman hears the varied carols of America — carpenter, mason, boatman, shoemaker — each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else.