Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves. - T.S. Eliot

'Like Barley Bending' by Sara Teasdale, photo by Wolfgang Hasselmann.

Mad Girl's Love Song

by Sylvia Plath

"I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my lids and all is born again. (I think I made you up inside my head.) The stars go waltzing out in blue and red, And arbitrary blackness gallops in: I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead. I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane. (I think I made you up inside my head.) God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade: Exit seraphim and Satan's men: I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead. I fancied you'd return the way you said, But I grow old and I forget your name. (I think I made you up inside my head.) I should have loved a thunderbird instead; At least when spring comes they roar back again. I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead. (I think I made you up inside my head.)"

An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any literature except the cleverness of decadence. - Raymond Chandler

Collage -Ash Wednesday by T.S. Eliot

If you tell a novelist "Life's not like that", he has to do something about it. The poet simply replies, "No, but I am." - Philip Larkin

Poem by Eleanor Farjeon, Art unknown

First Fig My candle burns at both ends; It will not last the night: But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends- It gives a lovey light!

from 'Figs from Thistles' by Edna St. Vincent Millay

from The Black Riders and Other Lines by Stephen Crane

EARTH

"A planet doesn't explode of itself," said drily The Martian astronomer, gazing off into the air- "That they were able to do it is proof that highly Intelligent beings must have been living there."

John Hall Wheelock

photo by Lucie Morel

Full Fathom Five

Old man, you surface seldom. Then you come in with the tide's coming When seas wash cold, foam Capped: white hair, white beard, far-flung, A dragnet, rising, falling, as waves Crest and trough. Miles long Extend the radical sheaves Of your spread hair, in which wrinkling skeins Knotted, caught, survives The old myth of origins Unimaginable. You float near As keeled ice-mountains Of the the north, to be steered clear Of, not fathomed. All obscurity Starts with a danger: Your dangers are many. I Cannot look much but your form suffers Some strange injury And seems to die: so vapours Ravel to clearness on the dawn sea. The muddy rumours. Of your burial move me To half-believe: your reappearence Proves rumours shallow, For the archaic trenched lines Of your grained face shed time in runnels: Ages beat like rains On the unbeaten channels Of the ocean. Such sage humour and Durance are whirlpools To make away with the ground Work of the earth and the sky's ridgepole. Waist down, you may wind One labyrinthine tangle To root deep among knuckles, shinbones, Skulls. Inscrutable, Below shoulders not once Seen by any man who kept his head, You defy questions You defy other godhood. I walk dry on you kingdom's border Exiled to no good. Your shelled bed I remember. Father, this thick air is murderous. I would breathe water.

by Sara Teasdale

Tell me, watcher, is is it winter? Say how long my sleep has been? Have the woods I left so lovely, Lost their robes of tender green? Is the morning slow in coming? Is the nighttime loath to go? Tell me, are the dreary mountains Drearier still with drifted snow?

From Gleneden's Dream by Emily Brontë