greykit.poetry — #1910s
-
1920
[wilfred-owen]
Anthem for Doomed Youth
What passing-bells for those who die as cattle? Only the monstrous anger of the guns — no mockeries, no prayers; their only memorial the tenderness of patient minds, and each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
-
1920
[wilfred-owen]
Dulce et Decorum Est
Owen's soldiers march exhausted through sludge; a gas attack takes one too slow with his helmet; the speaker inverts Horace's old lie — you would not glorify war if you had watched this man drown in his own lungs.
-
1920
[wilfred-owen]
Futility
Move him into the sun — it woke him always, even in France, until this morning and this snow; was it for this the clay grew tall? — O what made fatuous sunbeams toil to break earth's sleep at all?
-
1919
[rudyard-kipling]
The Gods of the Copybook Headings
Kipling’s bleak parable — the plain truths you can deny, ignore, or outlaw, but never escape.
-
1919
[w-b-yeats]
The Wild Swans at Coole
On his nineteenth October at Coole Park, Yeats counts fifty-nine swans and watches them mount and scatter — unwearied, their hearts not grown old — and wonders where they will delight men's eyes when he wakes to find they have flown away.
-
1918
[gerard-manley-hopkins]
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame
Everything mortal does one thing — selves, goes itself, cries What I do is me — and the sestet turns that on the just man, in whose limbs and eyes Christ plays in ten thousand places.
-
1918
[gerard-manley-hopkins]
Binsey Poplars
My aspens dear, all felled — and the grief is not only for the trees but for how easily a country scene is unmade: ten or twelve strokes and the sweet especial scene is gone.
-
1918
[gerard-manley-hopkins]
Carrion Comfort
One of the terrible sonnets: a refusal to feast on despair, and a wrestling match with a lion-limbed God that the speaker only afterwards realises he was cheering — that night, that year of now done darkness, I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.
-
1918
[gerard-manley-hopkins]
Felix Randal
A priest's elegy for a farrier he anointed — the big-boned and hardy-handsome man broken by sickness, tears touched by a child's touch, and at the last the great grey drayhorse and the bright and battering sandal.
-
1918
[gerard-manley-hopkins]
God's Grandeur
The world is charged with the grandeur of God — yet men sear and smear the soil, shod from feeling it; and yet the Holy Ghost broods over the bent world with warm breast and bright wings.
-
1918
[carl-sandburg]
Grass
Austerlitz, Waterloo, Gettysburg, Ypres and Verdun are shovelled under and the grass gets to work — until the passengers no longer know what place this is. I am the grass. Let me work.
-
1918
[gerard-manley-hopkins]
Pied Beauty
A curtal sonnet of thanksgiving for dappled things — brinded skies, rose-moles on trout, finches' wings, landscape plotted and pieced — all fathered-forth by a beauty past change.
-
1918
[gerard-manley-hopkins]
Spring and Fall: to a young child
Hopkins asks Márgarét, weeping at Goldengrove's unleaving, whether she grieves for the world or for herself — sorrow's springs are the same; it is the blight man was born for, it is Margaret you mourn for.
-
1918
[gerard-manley-hopkins]
The Windhover
Watching a kestrel ride the morning wind, Hopkins finds mastery — the achieve of the thing — that buckles into the beauty of Christ; even the plough-share, shéer plód, flashes gold-vermillion.
-
1916
[robert-frost]
Birches
Ice storms bend the birches for good, but the poet would rather believe a boy did it — and wants the same for himself: to climb toward heaven until the tree sets him down again, since earth's the right place for love.
-
1916
[w-b-yeats]
Easter, 1916
Yeats's elegy for the leaders of the Easter Rising — men he had passed with a nod, transformed utterly by their sacrifice into a terrible beauty that is born.
-
1916
[carl-sandburg]
Fog
Six lines: the fog comes on little cat feet, sits on silent haunches looking over harbor and city, and moves on.
-
1916
[robert-frost]
The Road Not Taken
Two roads in a yellow wood, worn really about the same, and one taken for no better reason than that it had to be — with the sigh and the difference reserved for a telling ages and ages hence.
-
1915
[t-s-eliot]
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Prufrock's hesitant interior monologue circles a visit never quite made — measuring life in coffee spoons, hearing the mermaids sing, asking "Do I dare?" — a portrait of paralysis and the fear of the overwhelming question.
-
1914
[robert-frost]
After Apple-Picking
The ladder still points at heaven and a barrel stands unfilled, but the picker is done — drowsing through a pane of hoary ice, magnified apples appearing and disappearing, unsure whether the coming sleep is the woodchuck's or just human sleep.
-
1914
[thomas-hardy]
Channel Firing
Gunnery practice in April 1914 wakes the dead, who take it for Judgement Day; God tells them it is only the world making red war redder — and the sound carries inland to Stourton Tower, Camelot, and Stonehenge.
-
1914
[carl-sandburg]
Chicago
Hog Butcher for the World — the charges of wickedness, crookedness and brutality are all admitted, and then thrown back as a boast: a tall bold slugger laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of youth.
-
1914
[robert-frost]
Mending Wall
Two men walk the line each spring putting back the stones that winter and hunters threw down. One keeps saying good fences make good neighbours; the other keeps wondering what he was walling in or walling out.
-
1912
[edna-st-vincent-millay]
Renascence
Written at nineteen: the horizon presses down until the whole of infinity and all the world's suffering pours through her, she is buried and prays for rain — and comes back up into a world whose sky is no wider than the soul.
-
1912
[thomas-hardy]
The Convergence of the Twain
Hardy's cold meditation on the Titanic and the iceberg, grown in shadowy distance as twin halves of one august event, until the Spinner of the Years said "Now!" and jarred two hemispheres.
-
1910
[rudyard-kipling]
If—
A father’s litany of self-mastery — the whole world for the price of composure.
-
1910
[rudyard-kipling]
The Way Through the Woods
A road the forest swallowed — and the ghosts you can almost hear still riding it.