Nature, that washed her hands in milk,
And had forgot to dry them,
Instead of earth took snow and silk,
At love’ s request to try them,
If she a mistress could compose
To please love’ s fancy out of those.
Her eyes he would should be of light,
A violet breath, and lips of jelly;
Her hair not black, nor overbright,
And of the softest down her belly;
As for her inside he’ d have it
Only of wantonness and wit.
Yes. I remember Adlestrop —
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.
The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop — only the name
And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.
Within this sober frame expect
Work of no foreign architect;
That unto caves the quarries drew,
And forests did to pastures hew;
Who of his great design in pain
Did for a model vault his brain;
Whose columns should so high be rais’ d
To arch the brows that on them gaz’ d.
I
Students, look at this table
And now when you see a man six feet tall
You can call him a fathom.
Likewise, students when yes and you do that and other stuff
Likewise too the shoe falls upon the sun
And the alphabet is full of blood
And when you knock upon a sentence in the
Process of explication you are going to need a lot of rags
Likewise, hello and goodbye.
II
My chalk is no longer than a chip of fingernail,
Chip by which I must explain this Monday
Night the verbs “to get;” “to wear,” “to cut.”
I’ m not given much, these tired students,
Knuckle-wrapped from work as roofers,
Sour from scrubbing toilets and pedestal sinks.
I’ m given this room with five windows,
A coffee machine, a piano with busted strings,
The music of how we feel as the sun falls,
Exhausted from keeping up.
I stand at
They are so beautiful, and so very young
they seem almost to glitter with perfection,
these creatures that I briefly move among.
I never get to stay with them for long,
but even so, I view them with affection:
they are so beautiful, and so very young.
Poised or clumsy, placid or high-strung,
they're expert in the art ofintrospection,
these creatures that I briefly move among —
The child I left your class to have
Later had a habit of sleeping
With her arms around a globe
She’ d unscrewed, dropped, and dented.
I always felt she could possess it,
The pink countries and the mauve
And the ocean which got to keep its blue.
Coming from the Southern Hemisphere to teach,
Which you had never had to do, you took
A bare-walled room, alone, its northern
I passed by the school where I studied as a boy
and said in my heart: here I learned certain things
and didn't learn others. All my life I have loved in vain
the things I didn't learn. I am filled with knowledge,
I know all about the flowering of the tree of knowledge,
the shape of its leaves, the function of its root system, its pests and parasites.
I'm an expert on the botany of good and evil,
I'm still studying it, I'll go on studying till the day I die.
I stood near the school building and looked in. This is the room
I might as well begin by saying how much I like the title.
It gets me right away because I’ m in a workshop now
so immediately the poem has my attention,
like the Ancient Mariner grabbing me by the sleeve.
I was a math major — fond of all things rational.
It was the first day of my first poetry class.
The prof, with the air of a priest at Latin mass,
told us that we could “make great poetry personal,”
could own it, since poetry we memorize sings
inside us always. By way of illustration
he began reciting Shelley with real passion,
but stopped at “Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” —
because, with that last plosive, his top denture
popped from his mouth and bounced off an empty chair.
