The clock will go slow
If you watch it, you know;
You must work right along and forget it.
So study your best
Till it's time for a rest,
The clock will go fast, if you let it!
“Patience” by Gelett Burgess [w/ Audio]
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Tag Archives: American Literature
“A Carafe, that is a Blind Glass” by Gertrude Stein [w/ Audio]
A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and
nothing strange a single hurt color and an
arrangement in a system to pointing. All
this and not ordinary, not unordered in not
resembling. The difference is spreading.
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“The Oven Bird” by Robert Frost
There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down
in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.
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“Mending Wall” by Robert Frost [w/ Audio]
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 neighbor 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 neighbors.'
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? 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 offense.
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 neighbors.'
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“Chaucer” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow [w/ Audio]
An old man in a lodge within a park;
The chamber walls depicted all around
With portraitures of huntsman, hawk,
and hound,
And the hurt deer. He listeneth to the
lark,
Whose song comes with the sunshine
through the dark
Of painted glass in leaden lattice bound;
He listeneth and he laugheth at the
sound,
Then writeth in a book like any clerk.
He is the poet of the dawn, who wrote
The Canterbury Tales, and his old age
Made beautiful with song; and as I read
I heard the crowing cock, I hear the note
Of lark and linnet, and from every page
Rise odors of ploughed field or flowery
mead.
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“Poetry Is a Destructive Force” by Wallace Stevens [w/ Audio]
That's what misery is,
Nothing to have at heart.
It is to have or nothing.
It is a thing to have,
A lion, an ox in his breast,
To feel it breathing there.
Corazón, stout dog,
Young ox, bow-legged bear,
He tastes its blood, not spit.
He is like a man
In the body of a violent beast.
Its muscles are his own. . .
The lion sleeps in the sun.
Its nose is on its paws.
It can kill a man.
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“Tavern” by Edna St. Vincent Millay [w/ Audio]
I'll keep a little tavern
Below the high hill's crest,
Wherein all grey-eyed people
May sit them down and rest.
There shall be plates a-plenty,
And mugs to melt the chill
Of all the grey-eyed people
Who happen up the hill.
There sound will sleep the traveller,
And dream his journey's end,
But I will rouse at midnight
The falling fire to tend.
Aye, 'tis a curious fancy --
But all the good I know
Was taught me out of two grey eyes
A long time ago.
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“I like to see it lap the Miles –” (383) by Emily Dickinson [w/ Audio]
I like to see it lap the Miles --
And lick the Valleys up --
And stop to feed itself at Tanks --
And then - prodigious step
Around a Pile of Mountains --
And supercilious peer
In Shanties -- by the sides of Roads --
And then a Quarry pare
To fit its sides
And crawl between
Complaining all the while
In horrid -- hooting stanza --
Then chase itself down Hill --
And neigh like Boanerges --
Then - prompter than a Star
Stop - docile and omnipotent
At it's own stable door --
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“Once there came a man” by Stephen Crane [w/ Audio]
Once there came a man
Who said:
"Range me all men of the world in rows."
And instantly
There was a terrific clamor among the
people
Against being ranged in rows.
There was a loud quarrel, world-wide.
It endured for ages;
And blood was shed
By those who would not stand in rows,
And by those who pined to stand in rows.
Eventually, the man went to death, weeping.
And those who stayed in the bloody scuffle
Knew not the great simplicity.
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“Balls” by Amy Lowell [w/ Audio]
Throw the blue ball above the little twigs of the tree-tops,
And cast the yellow ball straight at the buzzing stars.
All our life is a flinging of colored balls
to impossible distances.
And in the end what have we?
A tired arm -- a tip-tilted nose.
Ah! Well! Give me the purple one.
Wouldn't it be a fine thing if I could make it stick
On top of the Methodist steeple?
Tiger Riding for Beginners 