THERE IS NO FRIGATE LIKE A BOOK

There is no Frigate like a Book

To take us Lands away,
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry –
This Traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of Toll –
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears a Human soul.

Emily Dickinson (1830-1866)

CONSTANTLY RISKING ABSURDITY

Constantly risking absurdity

and death
whenever he performs
above the heads
of his audience 5
the poet like an acrobat
climbs on rime
to a high wire of his own making
and balancing on eyebeams
above a sea of faces 10
paces his way
to the other side of the day
performing entrachats
and sleight-of-foot tricks
and other high theatrics 15
and all without mistaking
any thing
for what it may not be
For he's the super realist
who must perforce perceive 20
taut truth
before the taking of each stance or step

in his supposed advance

toward that still higher perch
where Beauty stands and waits 25
with gravity
to start her death-defying leap
And he
a little charleychaplin man
who may or may not catch 30
her fair eternal form
spreadeagled in the empty air
of existence

Lawrence Ferlinghetti (b. 1919)

ROBERT FROST (1874-1963)

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening 1923

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 5

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. 10
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, 15
And miles to go before I sleep.

In reading the following poems, pay special attention to imagery that

brings a scene or a natural setting to life for the reader. How does it appeal to
the senses? What does it do for the reader?

PETER MEINKE (born 1932)

Sunday at the Apple Market 1977

Apple-smell everywhere!
Haralson McIntosh Fireside Rome
old ciderpresses weathering in the shed
old ladders tilting at empty branches
boxes and bins of apples by the cartload 5
yellow and green and red
piled crazy in the storehouse barn
miraculous profusion, the crowd
around the testing table laughing rolling
the cool applechunks in their mouths 10
dogs barking at children in the appletrees
couples holding hands, so many people

out in the country carrying bushels

and baskets and bags and boxes of apples
to their cars, the smell of apples 15
making us for one Sunday afternoon free
and happy as people must have been meant to be.

LINDA PASTAN (born 1932)

Sometimes in Winter 1991

when I look into
the fragile faces
of those I love,

I long to be
one of those people who skate 5
over the surface

of their lives, scoring

the ice with patterns
of their own making,

people who have 10

no children.
who are attached

to earth only by
silver blades moving
at high speed, 15

who have learned to use

the medium of the cold
to dance in.

AUDRE LORDE (born 1934)

Coping

It has rained for five days

running
the world is
a round puddle
of sunless water 5
where small islands
are only beginning
to cope
a young boy
in my garden 10
is bailing out water
from his flower patch
when I ask him why
he tells me
young seeds that have not seen sun 15
forget
and drown easily.

THE RECEPTIVE READER

1. What is ordinary about the situation described in this poem? What is imagina-
tive about the way this poet looks at the rain? What gives the seeds a significance be-
yond their ordinary literal meaning?
2. What is the central word in this poem> How does the poet highlight it? What is
IMAGES AND FEELINGS

If . . . it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever

Warn me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the
top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.
EMILY DICKINSON

Poetic images have the power to stir our emotions. At times, the poet may
seem to adopt the stance of the neutral, unemotional reporter. The poet’s eye
then is the objective camera eye, recording dispassionately what it sees. How-
ever, many poems travel without warning from what the poet saw to what the
poet felt and thought. The scene we find ourselves reenacting in the following
poem has the hallucinatory intensity of a dream. What feeling of feelings does
it invite you to share?

URSALA K. LE GUIN (born 1929)

The Old Falling Down 1988

In the old falling-down

house of my childhood
I go down
stairs to sleep out-
side on the porch 5
under stars and dream
of trying to go up-
stairs but there are no
stairs so I climb
hand over hand clambering 10
scared and when I get there
to my high room, find
no bed, no chair, bare floor.

THE RECEPTIVE READER

1. What for you is the dominant emotion in this poem? (Does it make you share in
mixed or contradictory emotions?) What haunting images create the emotional effect?
2. What is the difference between “climbing and “clambering”?
3. Several split or divided words in this poem make us move on from the end of a
line to the next without the break or rest we would normally expect. Do you see any con-
nection between this extra effort required of the reader and the subject of the poem?

THE CREATIVE DIMENSION

Do you recognize the feeling or feelings pervading this poem? Have you ever had a
similar dream? Write a passage (or poem) about a haunting and perhaps recurrent
dream.

KENNETH REXROTH (born 1905)

Trout 1956

The trout is taken when he

Bites an artificial fly.
Confronted with fraud, keep your
Mouth shut, and don’t volunteer.
ECCLESIASTES ( 3: 1 – 8)

To every thing there is a season

To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under the heaven;
A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which
is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace,
and a time to refrain from embracing; 5
A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.

THE RECEPTIVE READER

Which of these opposed pairs from biblical times still play a major role in our lives?
For those that seem dated or obsolete, what would be a modern counterpart?

A Dream Deferred

In the thirties and forties, Langston Hughes came to be considered the

“poet laureate” or unofficial voice of black America. Each simile in the follow-
ing poem sets up a different scenario for what might happen if a dream is de-
ferred or hope denied. Which similes fit exceptionally well? Which scenario can
you most vividly imagine? Which seems to you most likely?

LANGSTON HUGHES (1902-1967)

Dream Deferred 1951

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run? 5
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load. 10
Or does it explode?

EMILY DICKINSON (1830-1886)

“Hope” is the thing with feathers 1861

Hope is the thing with feathers --

That perches in the soul --
And sings the tune without the words --
And never stops -- at all --

And sweetest -- in the Gale -- is heard -- 5

And sore must be the storm --
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm --

I've heard it in the chilliest land --

And on the strangest Sea --
Yet, never, in Extremity, 10
It asked a crumb of me.
SOUND AND SENSE

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,

As those move easiest who have learned to dance.
'Tis not enough no harshness gives offense,
The sound must seem an echo to the sense:
Soft is the strain when Zephyr gently blows,
And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows;
But when loud surges lash the sounding shore,
The hoarse, rough verse should like the torrent roar;
When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw,
The line too labors, and the words move slow;
Not so, when swift Camilla scours the plain,
Flies o'er the unbending corn, and skims along the main.
Hear how Timotheus' varied lays surprise,
And bid alternate passions fall and rise!

Alexander Pope (1688-1744)

TRAVELING THOUGH THE DARK

Traveling through the dark I found a deer

dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.
It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:
that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead.

By glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the car 5

and stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing;
she had stiffened already, almost cold.
I dragged her off; she was large in the belly.

My fingers touching her side brought me the reason—

her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting, 10
alive, still, never to be born.
Beside that mountain road I hesitated.

The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights;

under the hood purred the steady engine.
I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red; 15
around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.

I thought hard for us all—my only swerving—,

then pushed her over the edge into the river.

William Stafford (b.1914)

WE REAL COOL

The Pool Players.

Seven At The Golden Shovel.

We real cool. We
Left school. We

Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We
Die soon.
Gwendolyn Brooks (b. 1917)
THE EAGLE

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;

Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ringed with the azure world, he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)

DULCE ET DECORUM EST

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots, 5
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of GAS-SHELLS dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling,

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time, 10
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight 15

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin, 20
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs
Bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest 25
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Wiolfred Owen (1893-1918)

FOG

The fog coes

on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)

SOUTHERN COP

Let us forgive Ty Kendricks.

The place was Darktown He was young.
His nerves were jittery. The day was hot.
The Negro ran out of the alley.
As so Ty shot. 5

Let us understand Ty Kendricks.

The Negro must have been dangerous,
Because he ran;
And here was a rookie with a chance
To prove himself a man. 10

Let us condone Ty Kendricks

If we cannot decorate.
When he found what the Negro was running for,
It was too late;
And all we can say for the Negro is 15
It was unfortunate.

Let us pity Ty Kendricks.

He has been through enough,
Standing there, his big gun smoking,
Rabit-scared, alone. 20
Having to hear the wenches wail
And the dying Negro moan.

Sterling Brown (b. 1901)

THE DANCE

In Brueghel's great picture, The Kermess,

the dancers go round, they go round and
around, the squeal and the blare and the
tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles
tipping their bellies (round as the thick- 5
sided glasses whose wash they impound)
their hips and their bellies off balance
to turn them. Kicking and rolling
about the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those
shanks must be sound to bear up under such 10
rollicking measures, prance as they dance
in Brueghel's great picture, The Kermess.
William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)

INCIDENT
Once riding in old Baltimore
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,
 I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me.
Now I was eight and very small, 5
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue, and called me, "Nigger."
I saw the whole of Baltimore
From May until December; 10
Of all the things that happened there
That's all that I remember.
Countee Cullen (1903-1946)

MEETING AT NIGHT
The grey sea and the long black land;
And the yellow half-moon large and low;
And the startled little waves that leap
In fiery ringlets from their sleep,
As I gain the cove with pushing prow, 5
And quench its speed i' the slushy sand.

Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;

Three fields to cross till a farm appears;
A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch
And blue spurt of a lighted match, 10
And a voice less loud, thro' its joys and fears,
Than the two hearts beating each to each!
Robert Browning (1812-1889)
RICHARD CORY
Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed, 5

And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich -- yes, richer than a king --

And admirably schooled in every grace: 10
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,

And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night, 15
Went home and put a bullet through his head.
Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935)
THE TELEPHONE

“When I was just as far as I could walk

From here today,
There was an hour
All still
When leaning with my head against a flower 5
I heard you talk.
Don't say I didn't, for I heard you say--
You spoke from that flower on the window sill-
Do you remember what it was you said?”

“First tell me what it was you thought you heard.” 10

 “Having found the flower and driven a bee away,
I leaned my head,

And holding by the stalk,

I listened and I thought I caught the word--
What was it? Did you call me by my name? 15
Or did you say--
Someone said "Come" -- I heard it as I bowed.”

“I may have thought as much, but not aloud.”

"Well, so I came.”
Robert Frost (1874-1963)

LOVE IN BROOKLYN

"I love you, Horowitz," he said, and blew his nose.

She splashed her drink. "The hell you say," she said.
Then, thinking hard, she lit a cigarette:
"Not love. You don't love me. You like my legs,
and how I make your letters nice and all. 5
You drunk your drink too fast. You don't love me."

"You wanna bet?" he asked. "You wanna bet?

I loved you from the day they moved you up
from Payroll, last July. I watched you, right?
You sat there on that typing chair you have 10
and swung round like a kid. It made me shake.
Like once, in World War II, I saw a tank
slide through some trees at dawn like it was a god.
That's how you make me feel. I don't know why."

She turned towards him, then sat back and grinned, 15

and on the bar stool swung full circle round.
"You think I'm like a tank, you mean?" she asked.
"Some fellers tell me nicer things than that."
But then she saw his face and touched his arm
and softly said, "I'm only kidding you." 20
He ordered drinks, the same again, and paid.
A fat man, wordless, staring at the floor.
She took his hand in hers and pressed it hard.
And his plump fingers trembled in her lap.
DOVER BEACH

The sea is calm tonight,

The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits;-- on the French coast, the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay. 5
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, 10
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago 15

Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea. 20

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, 25
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world. pebbled beaches

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems 30
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain 35
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)

TWO JAPANESE HAIKU

The lightning flashes! A lightning gleam:

And slashing through the darkness, into darkness travels
A night-heron’s screech. a night heron’s scream.

Matsuo Basho (1644-

1694)

The falling flower Fallen flowers rise

I saw drift back to the branch back to the branch—I
watch:
Was a butterfly. Oh . . . butterflies!

Maritake (1452-
1540)
PIED BEAUTY
Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-color as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plow; 5
And áll trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dím;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: 10
Praise him.

QUESTION

Which is the superior poem? Explain in full.

PITCHER

His art is eccentricity, his aim

How not to hit the mark he seems to aim at,

His passion how to avoid the obvious,

His technique how to vary the avoidance.

The others throw to be comprehended. He 5

Throws to be a moment misunderstood.

Yet not too much. Not errant, arrant, wild,

But every seeming aberration willed.

Not to, yet still, still to communicate

Making the batter understand too late. 10

THE OLD-FASHIONED PITCHER

How dear to my heart was the old-fashioned hurler

Who labored all day on the old village green.
He did not resemble the up-to-date twirler
Who pitches four innings and ducks from the scene.
The up-to-date twirler I’m not very strong for; 5
He has a queer habit of pulling up lame.
And that is the reason I hanker and long for
The pitcher who started and finished the game.
The old-fashioned pitcher,
The iron-armed pitcher, 10
The stout-hearted pitcher
Who finished the game.
THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre spiral

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere 5
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand. 10
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, 15
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, 20
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

THE SECOND COMING. In Christian legend the prophesied “Second Coming” may refer
Either to Christ or to Antichrist. Yeats believed in a cyclical theory of history in which one
Historical era would be replaced by an opposite kind of era every two thousand years. Here,
The anarchy in the world following World War I (the poem was written in 1919) heralds the
End of the Christian era. 12. Spritus Mudi: the racial memory of collective unconscious
Mind of mankind (literally, world spirit).

THE TRURO BEAR

There’s a bear in the Truro woods.

People have seen it—three or four,
or two, or one. I think
of the thickness of the serious woods
around the dark bowls of the Truro ponds; 5
I think of the blueberry fields, the blackberry tangles,
the cranberry bogs. And the sky
with its new moon, its familiar star-trails,
burns down like a brand-new heaven,
while everywhere I look on the scratchy hillsides 10
shadows seem to grow shoulders. Surely
a beast might be clever, be lucky, move quietly
through the woods for years, learning to stay away
from roads and houses. Common sense mutters:
it can’t be true, it must be somebody’s 15
runaway dog. But the seed
has been planted, and when has happiness ever
required much evidence to begin
its leaf-green breathing?

Mary Oliver (b.1935)

GOD’S GRANDEUR

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; 5
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; 10
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)

THE SILKEN TENT

She is as in a field a silken tent

At midday when the sunny summer breeze
Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent,
So that in guys it gently sways at ease,
And its supporting central cedar pole, 5
That is its pinnacle to heavenward
And signifies the sureness of the soul,
Seems to owe naught to any single cord,
But strictly held by none, is loosely bound
By countless silken ties of love and thought 10
To everything on earth the compass round,
And only by one's going slightly taut
In the capriciousness of summer air
Is of the slightest bondage made aware.

Robert Frost (1874-1963)

WHEN MY LOVE SWEARS

THAT SHE IS MADE OF TRUTH

When my love swears that she is made of truth,

I do believe her, though I know she lies,
That she might think me some untutor'd youth,
Unlearned in the world's false subtleties.
Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young, 5
Although she knows my days are past the best,
Simply I credit her false-speaking tongue:
On both sides thus is simple truth supprest.
But wherefore says she not she is unjust? unfaithful
And wherefore say not I that I am old? 10
O, love's best habit is in seeming trust,
And age in love loves not to have years told:
Therefore I lie with her and she with me,
And in our faults by lies we flatter'd be.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

THAT TIME OF YEAR
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day 5
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie 10
As the deathbed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

ON FIRST LOOKING INTO CHAPMAN’S HOMER

Much have I traveled in the realms of gold,

And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told 5
That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne:
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken; 10
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific—and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

John Keats (1795-1821)

ANTHEM FOR DOOMED YOUTH

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?

Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells, 5
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, –
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes 10
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)

THE WORLD IS TOO MUCH WITH US

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon; 5
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.—Great God! I'd rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn; 10
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

LET ME NOT TO THE MARRIAGE

OF TRUE MIND

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark 5
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come; 10
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

MY MISTRESS EYES ARE NOTHING

LIKE THE SUN

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;

Coral is far more red than her lips' red:
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head. 4
I have seen roses damasked, red and white, of different colors
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks. exhales
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound: 10
I grant I never saw a goddess go,--
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616)