Song of the Open Road, I by Walt Whitman, 1819 - 1892

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose. 

Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune,
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,
Strong and content I travel the open road.

The earth, that is sufficient,
I do not want the constellations any nearer,
I know they are very well where they are,
I know they suffice for those who belong to them.

(Still here I carry my old delicious burdens,
I carry them, men and women, I carry them with me wherever I         go,
I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them,
I am fill’d with them, and I will fill them in return.)

Ode to Psyche, by John Keats

O Goddess! hear these tuneless numbers, wrung          By sweet enforcement and remembrance dear, And pardon that thy secrets should be sung          Even into thine own soft-conched ear: Surely I dreamt to-day, or did I see          The winged Psyche with awaken’d eyes? I wander'd in a forest thoughtlessly,          And, on the sudden, fainting with surprise, Saw two fair creatures, couched side by side          In deepest grass, beneath the whisp’ring roof          Of leaves and trembled blossoms, where there ran                 A brooklet, scarce espied: Mid hush'd, cool-rooted flowers, fragrant-eyed,          Blue, silver-white, and budded Tyrian, They lay calm-breathing, on the bedded grass;          Their arms embraced, and their pinions too;          Their lips touch’d not, but had not bade adieu, As if disjoined by soft-handed slumber, And ready still past kisses to outnumber          At tender eye-dawn of aurorean love:                 The winged boy I knew; But who wast thou, O happy, happy dove?                 His Psyche true! O latest born and loveliest vision far          Of all Olympus’ faded hierarchy! Fairer than Phoebe's sapphire-region’d star,          Or Vesper, amorous glow-worm of the sky; Fairer than these, though temple thou hast none,                 Nor altar heap’d with flowers; Nor virgin-choir to make delicious moan                 Upon the midnight hours; No voice, no lute, no pipe, no incense sweet          From chain-swung censer teeming; No shrine, no grove, no oracle, no heat          Of pale-mouth’d prophet dreaming. O brightest! though too late for antique vows,          Too, too late for the fond believing lyre, When holy were the haunted forest boughs,          Holy the air, the water, and the fire; Yet even in these days so far retir’d          From happy pieties, thy lucent fans,          Fluttering among the faint Olympians, I see, and sing, by my own eyes inspir’d. So let me be thy choir, and make a moan                 Upon the midnight hours; Thy voice, thy lute, thy pipe, thy incense sweet          From swinged censer teeming; Thy shrine, thy grove, thy oracle, thy heat          Of pale-mouth’d prophet dreaming. Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane          In some untrodden region of my mind, Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain,          Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind: Far, far around shall those dark-cluster’d trees          Fledge the wild-ridged mountains steep by steep; And there by zephyrs, streams, and birds, and bees,          The moss-lain Dryads shall be lull’d to sleep; And in the midst of this wide quietness A rosy sanctuary will I dress With the wreath’d trellis of a working brain,          With buds, and bells, and stars without a name, With all the gardener Fancy e’er could feign,          Who breeding flowers, will never breed the same: And there shall be for thee all soft delight          That shadowy thought can win, A bright torch, and a casement ope at night,          To let the warm Love in!

Coldness in love

And you remember, in the afternoon
The sea and the sky went grey, as if there had sunk
A flocculent dust on the floor of the world: the festoon
Of the sky sagged dusty as spider cloth,
And coldness clogged the sea, till it ceased to croon.

A dank, sickening scent came up from the grime
Of weed that blackened the shore, so that I recoiled
Feeling the raw cold dun me: and all the time
You leapt about on the slippery rocks, and threw
Me words that rang with a brassy, shallow chime.

And all day long, that raw and ancient cold
Deadened me through, till the grey downs dulled to sleep.
Then I longed for you with your mantle of love to fold
Me over, and drive from out of my body the deep
Cold that had sunk to my soul, and there kept hold.

But still to me all evening long you were cold,
And I was numb with a bitter, deathly ache;
Till old days drew me back into their fold,
And dim hopes crowded me warm with companionship,
And memories clustered me close, and sleep was cajoled.

And I slept till dawn at the window blew in like dust,
Like a linty, raw-cold dust disturbed from the floor
Of the unswept sea; a grey pale light like must
That settled upon my face and hands till it seemed
To flourish there, as pale mould blooms on a crust.

And I rose in fear, needing you fearfully.
For I thought you were warm as a sudden jet of blood.
I thought I could plunge in your living hotness, and be
Clean of the cold and the must. With my hand on the latch
I heard you in your sleep speak strangely to me.

And I dared not enter, feeling suddenly dismayed.
So I went and washed my deadened flesh in the sea
And came back tingling clean, but worn and frayed
With cold, like the shell of the moon; and strange it seems
That my love can dawn in warmth again, unafraid.

Song, by T. S. Eliot

When we came home across the hill     No leaves were fallen from the trees;     The gentle fingers of the breeze Had torn no quivering cobweb down. The hedgerow bloomed with flowers still,     No withered petals lay beneath;     But the wild roses in your wreath Were faded, and the leaves were brown.

Ghost Music, by Robert Graves

Gloomy and bare the organ-loft, Bent-backed and blind the organist. From rafters looming shadowy, From the pipes’ tuneful company, Drifted together drowsily, Innumerable, formless, dim, The ghosts of long-dead melodies, Of anthems, stately, thunderous, Of Kyries shrill and tremulous: In melancholy drowsy-sweet They huddled there in harmony. Like bats at noontide rafter-hung.

Sunset, by E. E. Cummings

Great carnal mountains crouching in the cloud That marrieth the young earth with a ring, Yet still its thoughts builds heavenward, whence spring Wee villages of vapor, sunset-proud.— And to the meanest door hastes one pure-browed White-fingered star, a little, childish thing, The busy needle of her light to bring, And stitch, and stitch, upon the dead day’s shroud. Poises the sun upon his west, a spark Superlative,—and dives beneath the world; From the day’s fillets Night shakes out her locks; List! One pure trembling drop of cadence purled— “Summer!”—a meek thrush whispers to the dark. Hark! the cold ripple sneering on the rocks!

LETTERS, by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every day brings a ship,
Every ship brings a word;
Well for those who have no fear,
Looking seaward well assured
That the word the vessel brings
Is the word they wish to hear.

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“She had the perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very, dangerous to live even one day.”

Joyce Carol Oates

Her favored remark was Things could be a helluva lot worse delivered with a TVcomic shrug.

The Inward Morning, by Henry David Thoreau

Packed in my mind lie all the clothes
   Which outward nature wears,
And in its fashion’s hourly change
    It all things else repairs.

In vain I look for change abroad,
    And can no difference find,
Till some new ray of peace uncalled
    Illumes my inmost mind.

What is it gilds the trees and clouds,
    And paints the heavens so gay,
But yonder fast-abiding light
    With its unchanging ray?

Lo, when the sun streams through the wood,
    Upon a winter’s morn,
Where’er his silent beams intrude
    The murky night is gone.

How could the patient pine have known
    The morning breeze would come,
Or humble flowers anticipate
    The insect’s noonday hum,—

Till the new light with morning cheer
    From far streamed through the aisles,
And nimbly told the forest trees
    For many stretching miles?

I’ve heard within my inmost soul
    Such cheerful morning news,
In the horizon of my mind
    Have seen such orient hues,

As in the twilight of the dawn,
    When the first birds awake,
Are heard within some silent wood,
    Where they the small twigs break,

Or in the eastern skies are seen,
    Before the sun appears,
The harbingers of summer heats
    Which from afar he bears.