Another wonderful Robert Frost Poem

 

Acquainted with the Night

BY ROBERT FROST

I have been one acquainted with the night.

I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.

I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.

I have passed by the watchman on his beat

And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet

When far away an interrupted cry

Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;

And further still at an unearthly height,

One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right. 

I have been one acquainted with the night.

Poem by Mary Oliver: THE SWAN

 

Love her poetry!

The Swan 

Did you too see it, drifting, all night, on the black river?

Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air –

An armful of white blossoms,

A perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned

into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lilies,

Biting the air with its black beak?

Did you hear it, fluting and whistling

A shrill dark music – like the rain pelting the trees – like a waterfall

Knifing down the black ledges?

And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds –

A white cross Streaming across the sky, its feet

Like black leaves, its wings Like the stretching light of the river?

And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?

And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?

And have you changed your life?

 

– Mary Oliver 

Mary Oliver Prose Poem: "DON'T HESITATE!"

Love her poems and prose poems!

Mary Oliver Poem: The Summer Day

Love her poetry!

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down- who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes. Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face. Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

—Mary Oliver

Another Robert Frost Poem

 

"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"

by Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.   

His house is in the village though;   

He will not see me stopping here   

To watch his woods fill up with snow.   

My little horse must think it queer   

To stop without a farmhouse near   

Between the woods and frozen lake   

The darkest evening of the year.   

He gives his harness bells a shake   

To ask if there is some mistake.   

The only other sound’s the sweep   

Of easy wind and downy flake.   

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,   

But I have promises to keep,   

And miles to go before I sleep,   

And miles to go before I sleep.

Another Favorite Poet: Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson

 Wild nights - Wild nights! (269)

BY EMILY DICKINSON

 

Wild nights - Wild nights!

Were I with thee

Wild nights should be

Our luxury!

 

Futile - the winds -

To a Heart in port -

Done with the Compass -

Done with the Chart!

 

Rowing in Eden -

Ah - the Sea!

Might I but moor - tonight -

In thee!

  

Success is counted sweetest (112)

BY EMILY DICKINSON

 

Success is counted sweetest

By those who ne'er succeed.

To comprehend a nectar

Requires sorest need.

 

Not one of all the purple Host

Who took the Flag today

Can tell the definition

So clear of victory

 

As he defeated – dying –

On whose forbidden ear

The distant strains of triumph

Burst agonized and clear!

 

And here's a link to 10 of her best poems for you to peruse!

Quotes: Seamus Heaney

 

Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney is one of my favorite Irish poets. He won the Nobel prize in 1995, "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past."

Here are two of his famous quotes.

"The main thing is to write for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust that imagines its haven like your hands at night dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast. You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous. Take off from here."

"Strange is the huge nothing that we fear!" 

"Cure of Troy" by Seamus Heaney

 

"Seamus Heaney" by Burns Library, Boston College
Licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Seamus Heaney is an Irish Nobel Laureate poet. He is one of President Biden's favorite Irish poets and one of mine as well. In honour of the inauguration today, here is a poem that President Biden is especially fond of.

THE CURE OF TROY

 

Human beings suffer.
They torture one another.

They get hurt and get hard.

No poem or play or song

Can fully right a wrong

Inflicted and endured.

 

History says, Don’t hope

On the side of the grave,’ 

But then, once in a lifetime 

The longed for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.

 

So hope for a great sea-change

On the far side of revenge.

Believe that a further shore
Is reachable from here. 

Believe in miracles.
And cures and healing wells.

 

Call miracle self-healing,
The utter self revealing

Double-take of feeling.
If there’s fire on the mountain

And lightening and storm
And a god speaks from the sky

 

That means someone is hearing

The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.
It means once in a lifetime 

That justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.

 

by Seamus Heaney 

My Favorite Poem!

"The Road Not Taken"

by Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

Another Of My Favorite Poets: Seamus Heaney from Ireland

"Bogland"

by Seamus Heaney

We have no prairies 

To slice a big sun at evening-- 

Everywhere the eye concedes to 

Encrouching horizon, 

Is wooed into the cyclops' eye 

Of a tarn. Our unfenced country 

Is bog that keeps crusting 

Between the sights of the sun. 

They've taken the skeleton 

Of the Great Irish Elk 

Out of the peat, set it up 

An astounding crate full of air. 

Butter sunk under 

More than a hundred years 

Was recovered salty and white. 

The ground itself is kind, black butter 

Melting and opening underfoot, 

Missing its last definition 

By millions of years. 

They'll never dig coal here, 

Only the waterlogged trunks 

Of great firs, soft as pulp. 

Our pioneers keep striking 

Inwards and downwards, 

Every layer they strip 

Seems camped on before. 

The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage. 

The wet centre is bottomless. 

One Of My Favorite Poets

Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver is one of my favorite poets. Sadly she passed away in January of this year. I'll miss her voice.