Jilly+H

= Binding Topic of "Man and Nature" =

"The Sun Rising" Busy old fool, unruly sun, Why dost thou thus Through windows and through curtains call on us? Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run? Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide Late schoolboys and sour 'prentices, Go tell court-huntsmen that the king will ride, Call country ants to harvest offices; Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime, Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

Thy beams so reverend and strong Why shouldst thou think? I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink, But that I would not lose her sight so long; If her eyes have not blinded thine, Look, and tomorrow late tell me Whether both th' Indias of spice and mine Be where thou left'st them, or lie here with me. Ask for those kings whom thou saw'st yesterday, And thou shalt hear, "All here in one bed lay."

She's all states, and all princes I; Nothing else is. Princes do but play us; compared to this, All honor's mimic, all wealth alchemy. Thou, sun, art half as happy as we, In that the world's contracted thus; Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be To warm the world, that's done in warming us. Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere; This bed thy center is, these walls thy sphere. // John Donne (1572-1631) //

"The Fish"
I caught a tremendous fish and held him beside the boat half out of water, with my hook fast in a corner of his mouth. He didn't fight. He hadn't fought at all. He hung a grunting weight, battered and venerable and homely. Here and there his brown skin hung in strips like ancient wallpaper, and it's pattern of darker brown was like wallpaper: shapes like full-blown roses stained and lost through age. He was speckled in barnacles, fine rosettes of lime, and infested with tiny white sea-lice, and underneath two or three rags of green weed hung down. While his gills were breathing in the terrible oxygen ––the frightening gills, fresh and crisp with blood, that can cut so badly–– I thought of the coarse white flesh packed in like feathers, the big bones and the little bones, the dramatic reds and blacks of his shiny entrails, and the pink swim-bladder like a big peony. I look into his eyes which were far larger than mine but shallower, and yellowed, the irises backed and packed with tarnished tinfoil seen through the lenses of old scratched isinglass. They shift a little, but not to return my stare. ––It was more like the tipping of an object toward the light. I admired his sullen face, the mechanism of his jaw, and then I saw that from his lower lip ––if you could call it a lip–– grim, wet, and weaponlike, hung five old pieces of fish-line, or four and a wire leader with the swivel still attached, with all their five big hooks grown firmly in his mouth. A green line, frayed at the end where he broke it, two heavier lines, and a fine black thread still crimped from the strain and snap when it broke and he got away. Like medals with their ribbons frayed and wavering, a five-haired beard of wisdom trailing from his aching jaw. I stared and stared and victory filled up the little rented boat, from the pool of bilge where oil had spread a rainbow around the rusted engine to the bailer rusted orange, the sun-cracked thwarts, the oarlocks on their strings, the gunnels––until everything was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! And I let the fish go. //Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)// Bishop's Higher Purpose

"Tree at My Window"
Tree at my window, window tree, My sash is lowered when night comes on; But let there never be curtain drawn Between you and me.

Vague dream-head lifted out of the ground, And thing next most diffuse to cloud, Not all your light tongues talking aloud Could be profound.

But, tree, I have seen you taken and tossed, And if you have seen me while I slept, You have seen me when I was taken and swept And all but lost.

That day she put our heads together, Fate had her imagination about her, Your head so much concerned with outer, Mine with inner, weather. // Robert Frost (1874-1963)

Frost's Higher Purpose //

"America"
Although she feeds me bread of bitterness, And sinks into my throat her tiger's tooth, Stealing my breath of life, I will confess I love this cultured hell that tests my youth! Her vigor flowers like tides into my blood, Giving my strength erect against her hate. Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood. Yet as a rebel fronts a king in state, I stand within her wals with not a shred Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer. Darkly I gaze into the days ahead, And I see her might and granite wonders there, Beneath the touch of Time's unerring hand, Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand. // Claude McKay (1890-1948)

McKay's Higher Purpose //

The Big Wrap Up

All of these poems come from __Sound and Sense__