Those Winter Sundays
Sundays too my father got up
early
and put his clothes on in the
blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that
ached
from labor in the weekday
weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever
thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold
splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and
dress,
fearing the chronic angers of
that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as
well.
What did I know, what did I
know
The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the
widening gyre
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
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.
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,
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,
And what rough beast, its hour
come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be
born?
We Real Cool
We real cool. We
Left school. We
Lurk late. We
Strike Straight. We
Sing sin. We
Thin grin. We
Jazz June. We
Die soon.
Mending Wall
Something there is that doesn't
love a wall,
That sends the
frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in
the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass
abreast.
The work of hunters is another
thing:
I have come after them and made
repair
Where they have left not one
stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit
out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The
gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or
heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we
find them there.
I let my neighbour know beyond
the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the
line
And set the wall between us once
again.
We keep the wall between us as
we go.
To each the boulders that have
fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so
nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make
them balance:
"Stay where you are until
our backs are turned!"
We wear our fingers rough with
handling them.
Oh, just another kind of
out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to
little more:
There where it is we do not need
the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple
orchard.
My apple trees will never get
across
And eat the cones under his
pines, I tell him.
He only says, "Good fences
make good neighbours."
Spring is the mischief in me,
and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his
head:
"Why do they make
good neighbours? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here
there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to
know
What I was walling in or walling
out,
And to whom I was like to give
offence.
Something there is that doesn't
love a wall,
That wants it down." I
could say "Elves" to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and
I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see
him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly
by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone
savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems
to me,
Not of woods only and the shade
of trees.
He will not go behind his
father's saying,
And he likes having thought of
it so well
He says again, "Good fences
make good neighbours."
Danse Russe
If I when my wife is sleeping
and the baby and Kathleen
are sleeping
and the sun is a flame-white
disc
in silken mists
above shining trees,—
if I in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely
before my mirror
waving my shirt round my head
and singing softly to myself:
“I am lonely, lonely.
I was born to be lonely,
I am best so!”
If I admire my arms, my face,
my shoulders, flanks, buttocks
against the yellow drawn
shades,—
Who shall say I am not
the happy genius of my household?
