Introduction to Poetry

Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem

and hold it up to the light 

like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem

and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room

and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to water ski

across the surface of a poem

waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do

is tie the poem to a chair with rope

and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose

to find out what it really means.

End of the Line

Luke 15:25-30

I

followed the rules,

did what I was told

and what do You do?

Where

in the rule book

is this

behavior forgiven?

Even more,

where

in the rule book

is this

behavior celebrated?

And even though

You insist

this is what 

Love does

to those who return

to Graceland

(in spite of the rule book)

there is

no way

I will 

enter this house.

That Business is Our Life

Luke 18:9-14

“We fear the publican’s acceptance 

because we know precisely what it means. 

It means that we will never be free 

until we are dead 

to the whole business 

of justifying ourselves. 

But since that business is our life,  

that means not until we are dead.”

--Robert Farrar Capon

To a Child Dancing in the Wind W.B. Yeats

I

DANCE there upon the shore;  

What need have you to care  

For wind or water’s roar?  

And tumble out your hair  

That the salt drops have wet;         

Being young you have not known  

The fool’s triumph, nor yet  

Love lost as soon as won,  

Nor the best labourer dead  

And all the sheaves to bind.  

What need have you to dread  

The monstrous crying of wind?  

  

II

Has no one said those daring  

Kind eyes should be more learn’d?  

Or warned you how despairing  

The moths are when they are burned,  

I could have warned you, but you are young,  

So we speak a different tongue.  

  

O you will take whatever’s offered  

And dream that all the world’s a friend,  

Suffer as your mother suffered,  

Be as broken in the end.  

But I am old and you are young,  

And I speak a barbarous tongue.

A Drinking Song

WINE comes in at the mouth

And love comes in at the eye;

That's all we shall know for truth

Before we grow old and die.

I lift the glass to my mouth,

I look at you, and I sigh. 

William Butler Yeats

Forty Years Later

(After the fall)

It is my prayer,

 it is my longing,

 that we may pass

 from this life together--

a longing which shall never perish from the earth, 

but shall have place in the heart of every wife that loves, 

until the end of time; and it shall be called by my name.

But if one of us must go first,

 it is my prayer that it shall be I;

 for he is strong, I am weak,

 I am not so necessary to him

 as he is to me --

life without him would not be life; 

how could I endure it? 

This prayer is also immortal, 

and will not cease from being offered up 

while my race continues. 

I am the first wife; 

and in the last wife 

I shall be repeated.

Mark Twain

To Jesus on Easter By Vassar Miller

You see the universe, as I see daylight,

opening to your heart

like fingers of a little child uncurling.

It lies to you no more than wood to blade,

nor will you tell me lies.

Only fools or cowards lie. And you are neither.

Not that I comprehend You, who are simpler

than all our words about you,

and deeper. They drop around you like dead leaves.

Yet I can trust you. You resembling me—

two eyes, two hands, two feet,

fives senses and no more—will cup my being,

spilling toward nothingness, within your palm.

And when the last bridge breaks,

I shall walk on the bright span of your breath.