greykit.poetry — #1920s
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1928
[robert-frost]
Acquainted with the Night
A terza rima walk past the watchman and the saddest city lane, stopping at an interrupted cry that was not for him, under a luminary clock that proclaims the time neither wrong nor right.
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1928
[w-b-yeats]
Leda and the Swan
A sudden blow, and the whole Trojan war folded into it — the broken wall, the burning roof and tower and Agamemnon dead — closing on the question of whether she put on his knowledge with his power.
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1928
[w-b-yeats]
Sailing to Byzantium
Yeats leaves the country of the young and sensual — dying generations caught in their music — and sails to the holy city of Byzantium, asking its gold-mosaic sages to gather him out of nature into the artifice of eternity, a hammered golden bird singing of what is past, or passing, or to come.
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1925
[t-s-eliot]
The Hollow Men
In five sections the hollow men inhabit death's dream kingdom — paralysed force, gesture without motion — circling the prickly pear as the world ends not with a bang but a whimper.
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1923
[robert-frost]
Fire and Ice
Nine lines that weigh desire against hate as ways for the world to end, and find ice would suffice.
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1923
[robert-frost]
Nothing Gold Can Stay
Nature's first green is gold and her hardest hue to hold: leaf subsides to leaf, Eden sinks to grief, dawn goes down to day.
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1923
[robert-frost]
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
A pause between the woods and frozen lake on the darkest evening of the year, the horse shaking its bells at the strangeness of it — lovely, dark and deep, and set against promises and miles to go before sleep.
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1922
[t-s-eliot]
The Waste Land
Eliot's fractured masterpiece in five parts — voices from the ruins of post-war Europe, the Fisher King, the Thames, a game of chess, the fire sermon — ending in the Sanskrit peace of Shantih shantih shantih.
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1920
[wilfred-owen]
Exposure
Not the guns but the weather is the enemy — merciless iced east winds that knife them, sentries whispering, dawn massing in the east — and after every stanza the same shrug: but nothing happens.
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1920
[edna-st-vincent-millay]
First Fig
My candle burns at both ends — four lines that concede the night is short and refuse to care, because of the light.
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1920
[t-s-eliot]
Gerontion
An old man in a dry month speaks his meditation on history, faith, and the failure of knowledge — thought without action, passion lost, a dry brain in a dry season.
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1920
[wilfred-owen]
Insensibility
Happy are men who can lose imagination — the ode works through every kind of merciful deadening the front supplies, then curses those who by choice made themselves immune to the eternal reciprocity of tears.
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1920
[edna-st-vincent-millay]
Second Fig
Two lines setting the ugly house safe upon its rock against the shining palace built upon the sand — and preferring the sand.
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1920
[wilfred-owen]
Strange Meeting
Escaping down a tunnel out of battle, the speaker meets a sleeper who springs up and turns out to be the man he killed — and who mourns not his own death but the truth untold, the pity of war, the pity war distilled.
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1920
[w-b-yeats]
The Second Coming
The widening gyre of history unravels ceremony and conviction; out of Spiritus Mundi a rough beast with lion body and human head slouches toward Bethlehem to be born.
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1920
[wilfred-owen]
The Send-off
A draft entrained in secret, sung down the close darkening lanes and wreathed as if already a corpse — and the question of how many will come back, up half-known roads, to village wells.