As you set out for Ithaka
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
I had withdrawn in forest, and my song
Was swallowed up in leaves that blew alway...
High, high in the branches
the seawinds plunge and roar.
A storm is moving westward,
but here on the forest floor
the ferns have captured stillness.
A green sea growth they are.
I will put Chaos into fourteen lines
And keep him there; and let him thence escape
While I’m on leave from teaching, I thought it might be fun to share a more personal post here: the poems that my four-year-old son loves most, and even requests as part of bedtime story reading. If you have little ones, you might enjoy sharing some or all of these with them, too.
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Oh, the wild joy of living; the leaping from rock to rock,
The strong rending of boughs from the fir-trees, the cool
silver shock
Of the plunge in the pool’s living water, the hunt of the bear,
And the sultriness showing the lion is couch’d in his lair.
I spent the class period sharing with them three aspects of poetry that make it special, different from other forms of literature, and necessary to the human soul.
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I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat
In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.
Hope is the thing with feathers—
That perches in the soul—
And sings the tune without the words—
And never stops—at all—
How arrives it joy lies slain,
And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide
The gray 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…
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!
I have a passionate love of poetry, and I get to share it with my students all the time, but I also want to share it with you. Sign up for my mailing list so you can receive beautiful poems in your email inbox.
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