Selected Poetry for English 128, Week 3, Monday

 Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau;
Mock on, mock on; 'tis all in vain!
You throw the sand against the wind,
And the wind blows it back again.

And every sand becomes a gem
Reflected in the beams divine;
Blown back they blind the mocking eye,
but still in Israel's paths they shine.

The Atoms of Democritus
And Newton's Particles of Light
Are sands upon the Red Sea shore,
Where Israel's tents do shine so bright.

1 Titan! to whose immortal eyes
2 The sufferings of mortality,
3 Seen in their sad reality,
4 Were not as things that gods despise;
5 What was thy pity's recompense?
6 A silent suffering, and intense;
7 The rock, the vulture, and the chain,
8 All that the proud can feel of pain,
9 The agony they do not show,
10 The suffocating sense of woe,
11 Which speaks but in its loneliness,
12 And then is jealous lest the sky
13 Should have a listener, nor will sigh
14 Until its voice is echoless.

15 Titan! to thee the strife was given
16 Between the suffering and the will,
17 Which torture where they cannot kill;
18 And the inexorable Heaven,
19 And the deaf tyranny of Fate,
20 The ruling principle of Hate,
21 Which for its pleasure doth create
22 The things it may annihilate,
23 Refus'd thee even the boon to die:
24 The wretched gift Eternity
25 Was thine--and thou hast borne it well.
26 All that the Thunderer wrung from thee
27 Was but the menace which flung back
28 On him the torments of thy rack;
29 The fate thou didst so well foresee,
30 But would not to appease him tell;
31 And in thy Silence was his Sentence,
32 And in his Soul a vain repentance,
33 And evil dread so ill dissembled,
34 That in his hand the lightnings trembled.

35 Thy Godlike crime was to be kind,
36 To render with thy precepts less
37 The sum of human wretchedness,
38 And strengthen Man with his own mind;
39 But baffled as thou wert from high,
40 Still in thy patient energy,
41 In the endurance, and repulse
42 Of thine impenetrable Spirit,
43 Which Earth and Heaven could not convulse,
44 A mighty lesson we inherit:
45 Thou art a symbol and a sign
46 To Mortals of their fate and force;
47 Like thee, Man is in part divine,
48 A troubled stream from a pure source;
49 And Man in portions can foresee
50 His own funereal destiny;
51 His wretchedness, and his resistance,
52 And his sad unallied existence:
53 To which his Spirit may oppose
54 Itself--and equal to all woes,
55 And a firm will, and a deep sense,
56 Which even in torture can descry
57 Its own concenter'd recompense,
58 Triumphant where it dares defy,
59 And making Death a Victory.

Stranger, approach! within this iron door
Thrice locked and bolted, this rude arch beneath
That vaults with ponderous stone the cell; confined
By man, the great magician, who controuls
Fire, earth and air, and genii of the storm,
And bends the most remote and opposite things
To do him service and perform his will,­
A giant sits; stern Winter; here he piles,
While summer glows around, and southern gales
Dissolve the fainting world, his treasured snows
Within the rugged cave.­Stranger, approach!
He will not cramp thy limbs with sudden age,
Nor wither with his touch the coyest flower
That decks thy scented hair. Indignant here,
Like fettered Sampson when his might was spent
In puny feats to glad the festive halls
Of Gaza's wealthy sons; or he who sat
Midst laughing girls submiss, and patient twirled
The slender spindle in his sinewy grasp;
The rugged power, fair Pleasure's minister,
Exerts his art to deck the genial board;
Congeals the melting peach, the nectarine smooth,
Burnished and glowing from the sunny wall:
Darts sudden frost into the crimson veins
Of the moist berry; moulds the sugared hail:
Cools with his icy breath our flowing cups;
Or gives to the fresh dairy's nectared bowls
A quicker zest. Sullen he plies his task,
And on his shaking fingers counts the weeks
Of lingering Summer, mindful of his hour
To rush in whirlwinds forth, and rule the year.

1 When I heard the learn'd astronomer,
2 When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
3 When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
4 When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
5 How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
6 Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,
7 In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
8 Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.

Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise,
Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering
To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,
Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?
Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car?
And driven the Hamadryad from the wood
To seek a shelter in some happier star?
Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,
The Elfin from the green grass, and from me
The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?

A light exists in spring
Not present on the year
At any other period.
When March is scarcely here

A color stands abroad
On solitary hills
That science cannot overtake,
But human nature feels.

It waits upon the lawn;
It shows the furthest tree
Upon the furthest slope we know;
It almost speaks to me.

Then, as horizons step,
Or noons report away,
Without the formula of sound,
It passes, and we stay:

A quality of loss
Affecting our content,
As trade had suddenly encroached
Upon a sacrament.

"Faith" is a fine invention
When Gentlemen can see—
But Microscopes are prudent
In an Emergency.

1  When I see birches bend to left and right
2  Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
3  I like to think some boy's been swinging them.
4  But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay.
5  Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them
6  Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
7  After a rain. They click upon themselves
8  As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
9  As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
10 Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells
11 Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust--
12 Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
13 You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
14 They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
15 And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
16 So low for long, they never right themselves:
17 You may see their trunks arching in the woods
18 Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground
19 Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
20 Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
21 But I was going to say when Truth broke in
22 With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm
23 (Now am I free to be poetical?)
24 I should prefer to have some boy bend them
25 As he went out and in to fetch the cows--
26 Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
27 Whose only play was what he found himself,
28 Summer or winter, and could play alone.
29 One by one he subdued his father's trees
30 By riding them down over and over again
31 Until he took the stiffness out of them,
32 And not one but hung limp, not one was left
33 For him to conquer. He learned all there was
34 To learn about not launching out too soon
35 And so not carrying the tree away
36 Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
37 To the top branches, climbing carefully
38 With the same pains you use to fill a cup
39 Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
40 Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
41 Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
42 So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
43 And so I dream of going back to be.
44 It's when I'm weary of considerations,
45 And life is too much like a pathless wood
46 Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
47 Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
48 From a twig's having lashed across it open.
49 I'd like to get away from earth awhile
50 And then come back to it and begin over.
51 May no fate willfully misunderstand me
52 And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
53 Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:
54 I don't know where it's likely to go better.
55 I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,
56 And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
57 Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
58 But dipped its top and set me down again.
59 That would be good both going and coming back.
60 One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

Honor a going thing, goldfinch, corporation, tree,
morality: any working order,
animate or inanimate: it

has managed directed balance,
the incoming and outgoing energies are working right,
some energy left to the mechanism,

some ash, enough energy held
to maintain the order in repair,
assure further consumption of entropy,

expending energy to strengthen order:
honor the persisting reactor,
the container of change, the moderator: the yellow

bird flashes black wing-bars
in the new-leaving wild cherry bushes by the bay,
startles the hawk with beauty,

flitting to a branch where
flash vanishes into stillness,
hawk addled by the sudden loss of sight:

honor the chemistries, platelets, hemoglobin kinetics,
the light-sensitive iris, the enzymic intricacies
of control,

the gastric transformations, seed
dissolved to acrid liquors, synthesized into
chirp, vitreous humor, knowledge,

blood compulsion, instinct: honor the
unique genes,
molecules that reproduce themselves, divide into

sets, the nucleic grain transmitted
in slow change through ages of rising and falling form,
some cells set aside for the special work, mind

or perception rising into orders of courtship,
territorial rights, mind rising
from the physical chemistries

to guarantee that genes will be exchanged, male
and female met, the satisfactions cloaking a deeper
racial satisfaction:

heat kept by a feathered skin:
the living alembic, body heat maintained (bunsen
burner under the flask)

so the chemistries can proceed, reaction rates
interdependent, self-adjusting, with optimum
efficiency—the vessel firm, the flame

staying: isolated, contained reactions! the precise and
necessary worked out of random, reproducible,
the handiwork redeemed from chance, while the

goldfinch, unconscious of the billion operations
that stay its form, flashes, chirping (not a
great songster) in the bay cherry bushes wild of leaf.