Split the lark and you’ll find the music,
Bulb after bulb, in silver rolled,
Scantily dealt to the summer morning,
Saved for your ear when lutes be old.

Loose the flood, you shall find it patent,
Gush after gush, reserved for you;
Scarlet experiment! sceptic Thomas,
Now, do you doubt that your bird was true?

– LOYALTY – Split the lark and you’ll find the music by Emily Dickinson

‘TWAS comfort in her dying room
To hear the living clock,
A short relief to have the wind
Walk boldly up and knock,
Diversion from the dying theme
To hear the children play,
But wrong, the mere
That these could live,–
And This of ours must die!

– ‘TWAS comfort in her dying room by Emily Dickinson

The soul selects her own society,
Then shuts the door;
On her divine majority
Obtrude no more.

Unmoved, she notes the chariot’s pausing
At her low gate;
Unmoved, an emperor is kneeling
Upon her mat.

I’ve known her from an ample nation
Choose one;
Then close the valves of her attention
Like stone.

– EXCLUSION – The soul selects her own society by Emily Dickinson

Now finale to the shore,
Now land and life finale and farewell,
Now Voyager depart, (much, much for thee is yet in store,)
Often enough hast thou adventur’d o’er the seas,
Cautiously cruising, studying the charts,
Duly again to port and hawser’s tie returning;
But now obey thy cherish’d secret wish,
Embrace thy friends, leave all in order,
To port and hawser’s tie no more returning,
Depart upon thy endless cruise old Sailor.

– Now Finale to the Shore by Walt Whitman

Before I loved you, love, nothing was my own:
I wavered through the streets, among
objects:
nothing mattered or had a name:
the world was made of air, which waited.

I knew rooms full of ashes,
tunnels where the moon lived,
rough warehouses that growled ‘get lost’,
questions that insisted in the sand.

Everything was empty, dead, mute,
fallen abandoned, and decayed:
inconceivably alien, it all

belonged to someone else – to no one:
till your beauty and your poverty
filled the autumn plentiful with gifts.

– Sonnet XXV by Pablo Neruda

I read my sentence steadily,
Reviewed it with my eyes,
To see that I made no mistake
In its extremest clause, –

The date, and manner of the shame;
And then the pious form
That God have mercy on the soul
The jury voted him.

I made my soul familiar
With her extremity,
That at the last it should not be
A novel agony,

But she and Death, acquainted,
Meet tranquilly as friends,
Salute and pass without a hint –
And there the matter ends.

– I read my sentence steadily by Emily Dickinson

Love at the lips was touch
As sweet as I could bear;
And once that seemed too much;
I lived on air
That crossed me from sweet things,
The flow of- was it musk
From hidden grapevine springs
Down hill at dusk?
I had the swirl and ache
From sprays of honeysuckle
That when they’re gathered shake
Dew on the knuckle.
I craved strong sweets, but those
Seemed strong when I was young;
The petal of the rose
It was that stung.
Now no joy but lacks salt
That is not dashed with pain
And weariness and fault;
I crave the stain
Of tears, the aftermark
Of almost too much love,
The sweet of bitter bark
And burning clove.
When stiff and sore and scarred
I take away my hand
From leaning on it hard
In grass and sand,
The hurt is not enough:
I long for weight and strength
To feel the earth as rough
To all my length.

– To Earthward by Robert Frost

Our cowman, old Ed, hadn’t much in his head,
And lots of folks though him a witling;
But he wasn’t a fool, for he always kept cool,
And his sole recreation was whittling.
When I’d spill him my woes (ifantile, I suppose),
He’d harken and whittle and whittle;
then when I had done, turn his quid and say: Son,
Ye’re a-drownin’ yerself in yer spittle.

He’s gone to his grave, but the counsel he gave
I’ve proved in predicaments trying;
When I got in a stew, feeling ever so blue,
My failures and faults magnifying,
I’d think of old Ed as he sniffed and he said:
Shaw! them things don’t mater a tittle.
Ye darned little cuss, why make such a full?
Ye’re a-drownin’ yerself in yer spittle.

When you’re tangled with care till you’re up in the air,
And worry and fear have you quaking,
When each tiny trouble seems bigger than double,
Till mountains of mole-hills you’re making:
Go easy, my friend, things click in the end,
But maybe ’twill help you a little,
If you take Ed’s advise (though it may not sound nice):
Ye’re a-drownin’ yerself in yer spittle.

– Old Ed by Robert Service

Is this a holy thing to see
In a rich and fruitful land, –
Babes reduced to misery,
Fed with cold and usurous hand?

Is that trembling cry a song?
Can it be a song of joy?
And so many children poor?
It is a land of poverty!

And their sun does never shine,
And their fields are bleak and bare,
And their ways are filled with thorns:
It is eternal winter there.

For where’er the sun does shine,
And where’er the rain does fall,
Babes should never hunger there,
Nor poverty the mind appall.

– HOLY THURSDAY by William Blake

I WOULD that we were, my beloved, white birds on the foam of the sea!
We tire of the flame of the meteor, before it can fade and flee;
And the flame of the blue star of twilight, hung low on the rim of the sky,
Has awaked in our hearts, my beloved, a sadness that may not die.
A weariness comes from those dreamers, dew-dabbled, the lily and rose;
Ah, dream not of them, my beloved, the flame of the meteor that goes,
Or the flame of the blue star that lingers hung low in the fall of the dew:
For I would we were changed to white birds on the wandering foam: I and you!
I am haunted by numberless islands, and many a Danaan shore,
Where Time would surely forget us, and Sorrow come near us no more;
Soon far from the rose and the lily and fret of the flames would we be,
Were we only white birds, my beloved, buoyed out on the foam of the sea!

– The White Birds by William Butler Yeats