Group One
From Song of Myself, Walt Whitman
A
child said What is the grass? fetching
it to me with full hands,
How
could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.
I
guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.
Or
I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A
scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,
Bearing
the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?
Or
I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.
Or
I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And
it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow
zones,
Growing
among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I
give them the same, I receive them the same.
Group Two
465,
Emily Dickenson
After
great pain, a formal feeling comes—
The
Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs—
The
stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?
The
Feet, mechanical, go round—
Of
Ground, or Air, or Ought—
A
Wooden way
Regardless
grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone—
Remembered,
if outlived,
As
Freezing persons, recollect the Snow—
First—Chill—then
Stupor—then the letting go—
Group Three
from
The Idea of Order
at Key West, Wallace Stevens
She
sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The
water never formed to mind or voice,
Like
a body wholly body, fluttering
Its
empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made
constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That
was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.
The
sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The
song and water were not medleyed sound
Even
if what she sang was what she heard,
Since
what she sang was uttered word by word.
It
may be that in all her phrases stirred
The
grinding water and the gasping wind;
But
it was she and not the sea we heard.
For
she was the maker of the song she sang.
The
ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was
merely a place by which she walked to sing.
Group Four
from Lovesong
of J. Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Eliot
Let
us go then, you and I,
When
the evening is spread out against the sky
Like
a patient etherised upon a table;
Let
us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The
muttering retreats
Of
restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And
sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets
that follow like a tedious argument
Of
insidious intent
To
lead you to an overwhelming question...
Oh,
do not ask, ‘What is it?’
Let
us go and make our visit.
In
the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
Group Five
from
O sweet
spontaneous, E.E. Cummings
O
sweet spontaneous
earth how often have
the
doting
fingers of
prurient philosophers pinched
and poked thee
,has the naughty thumb
of science prodded
thy beauty .how
often have religions taken
thee upon their scraggy knees
squeezing and
buffeting thee that thou mightest
conceive
gods (but true to the incomparable
couch of death thy rhythmic lover
thou answerest
them only with spring)
Group Six
from
Fern Hill, Dylan
Thomas
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue
trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few
and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of
grace,
Nothing I cared, in the lamb white
days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by
the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to
sleep
I should hear him fly with the high
fields
And wake to the farm forever fled
from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the
mercy of his means,
Time held me green and
dying
Though I sang in my chains
like the sea.
Group Seven
from Where the Rainbow Ends, Robert
Lowell
I saw the sky descending,
black and white,
Not blue, on Boston where the winters wore
The skulls to jack-o’-lanterns on the slates,
And Hunger’s skin-and-bone retrievers tore
The chickadee and shrike. The thorn tree waits
Its victim and tonight
The worms will eat the deadwood to the foot
Of Ararat: the scythers, Time and Death,
Helmed locusts, move upon the tree of breath;
The wild ingrated olive and the root
Are withered, and a winter drifts to
where
The Pepperpot, ironic rainbow, spans
Charles River and its scales of scorched-earth miles
I saw my city in the Scales, the pans
Of judgment rising and descending.
Group
Eight
from Howl, Allen Ginsberg
angelheaded hipsters
burning for the ancient heavenly
connection
to the starry dynamo in the machin-
ery
of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and
high sat
up smoking
in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water
flats floating across the tops of cities
contemplating
jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El
and
saw
Mohammedan angels staggering on tene-
ment
roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant
cool eyes
hallucinating
Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy
among
the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy
&
publishing
obscene odes on the windows of the
skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear,
burn-
ing
their money in wastebaskets and listening
to the
Terror through the wall….