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My Sister, Who Died Young, Takes Up The Task . A basket of apples brown in our kitchen, their warm scent is the scent of ripening, and my sister, entering the room quietly, takes a seat at the table, takes up the task of peeling slowly away the blemished skins, even half-rotten ones are salvaged carefully. She makes sure to carve out the mealy flesh. For this, I am grateful. I explain, this elegy would love to save everything. She smiles at me, and before long, the empty bowl she uses fills, domed with thin slices she brushes into the mouth of a steaming pot on the stove. What can I do? I ask finally. Nothing, she says, let me finish this one thing alone.

Jon Pineda

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Strange! . I’d have you known! It puzzles me forever   To hear, day in, day out, the words men use,   But never a single word about you, never.   Strange!—in your every gesture, worlds of news.   On busses people talk. On curbs I hear them;   In parks I listen, barbershop and bar.   In banks they murmur, and I sidle near them;   But none allude to you there. None so far. I read books too, and turn the pages, spying:   You must be there, one beautiful as you!   But never, not by name. No planes are flying   Your name in lacy trailers past the blue   Marquees of heaven. No trumpets cry your fame.   Strange!—how no constellations spell your name!

John Frederick Nims

(1913-1999)

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Delia 1 . Unto the boundless Ocean of thy beauty Runs this poor river, charged with streams of zeal: Returning thee the tribute of my duty, Which here my love, my youth, my plaints reveal. Here I unclasp the book of my charged soul, Where I have cast th'accounts of all my care: Here have I summed my sighs, here I enroll How they were spent for thee; look what they are. Look on the dear expenses of my youth, And see how just I reckon with thine eyes: Examine well thy beauty with my truth, And cross my cares ere greater sum arise. Read it sweet maid, though it be done but slightly; Who can show all his love, doth love but lightly.

Samuel Daniel

(1562-1619)

A playwright and a poet whose second stage version of Cleopatra’s story informed Shakespeare’s. When one’s own name rhymes one can hardly go wrong.

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Astrophel and Stella: Sonnet LXXII  . Desire, though thou my old companion art, And oft so clings to my pure love, that I One from the other scarcely can descry, While each doth blow the fire of my heart; Now from thy felloswhip I needs must part, Venus is taught with Dian's wings to fly: I must no more in thy sweet passions lie; Virtue's gold now must head my Cupid's dart. Service and honor, wonder with delight, Fear to offend, will worthy to appear, Care shining in mine eyes, faith in my sprite: These things are left me by my only dear; But thou, Desire, because thou wouldst have all, Now banish'd art. But yet alas how shall?

Sir Philip Sidney

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I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day. What hours, O what black hours we have spent This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went! And more must, in yet longer light's delay.    With witness I speak this. But where I say Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent To dearest him that lives alas! away.  I am gall, I am heartburn. God's most deep decree Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me; Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.  Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see The lost are like this, and their scourge to be As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)

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Since there is no escape, since at the end    My body will be utterly destroyed, This hand I love as I have loved a friend,    This body I tended, wept with and enjoyed; Since there is no escape even for me    Who love life with a love too sharp to bear: The scent of orchards in the rain, the sea    And hours alone too still and sure for prayer— Since darkness waits for me, then all the more Let me go down as waves sweep to the shore    In pride, and let me sing with my last breath; In these few hours of light I lift my head; Life is my lover—I shall leave the dead    If there is any way to baffle death.

Sara Teasdale (1884-1933)

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Lullaby . My little lack-of-light, my swaddled soul,   December baby. Hush, for it is dark,   and will grow darker still. We must embark   directly. Bring an orange as the toll   for Charon: he will be our gondolier.   Upon the shore, the season pans for light,   and solstice fish, their eyes gone milky white,   come bearing riches for the dying year:   solstitial kingdom. It is yours, the mime   of branches and the drift of snow. With shaking   hands, Persephone, the winter’s wife,   will tender you a gift. Born in a time   of darkness, you will learn the trick of making.   You shall make your consolation all your life.

Amanda Jernigan

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Beloved, my Beloved, when I think That thou wast in the world a year ago, What time I sate alone here in the snow And saw no footprint, heard the silence sink No moment at thy voice ... but, link by link, Went counting all my chains, as if that so They never could fall off at any blow Struck by thy possible hand ... why, thus I drink Of life's great cup of wonder! Wonderful, Never to feel thee thrill the day or night With personal act or speech,—nor ever cull Some prescience of thee with the blossoms white Thou sawest growing! Atheists are as dull, Who cannot guess God's presence out of sight.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)

Sonnets from the Portuguese 20

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Fatal Interview I . What thing is that, built of salt and lime And such dry motes as in the sunbeam show, Has power upon me that do daily climb The dustless air?--for whom those peaks of snow Whereup the lungs of man with borrowed breath Go labouring to a doom I may not feel, Are but a pearled and roseate plain beneath My winged helmet and my winged heel. What sweet emotions neither foe nor friend Are these that clog my flight? what thing is this That hastening headlong to a dusty end Dare turn upon me these proud eyes of bliss? Up, up, my feathers!-- ere I lay you by To journey barefoot with a mortal joy.

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950)

from the Fatal Interview sequence, 1931

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Glanmore Sonnet III . This evening the cuckoo and the corncrake (So much, too much) consorted at twilight. It was all crepuscular and iambic. Out on the field a baby rabbit Took his bearings, and I knew the deer (I’ve seen them too from the window of the house, Like connoisseurs, inquisitive of air) Were careful under larch and May-green spruce. I had said earlier, ‘I won’t relapse From this strange loneliness I’ve brought us to. Dorothy and William—’ She interrupts: ‘You’re not going to compare us two...?’ Outside a rustling and twig-combing breeze Refreshes and relents. Is cadences.

Seamus Heaney (1939-2013)

from Opened Ground

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Glanmore Sonnet II . Sensings, mountings from the hiding places, Words entering almost the sense of touch Ferreting themselves out of their dark hutch— ‘These things are not secrets but mysteries,’ Oisin Kelly told me years ago In Belfast, hankering after stone That connived with the chisel, as if the grain Remembered what the mallet tapped to know. Then I landed in the hedge-school of Glanmore And from the backs of ditches hoped to raise A voice caught back off slug-horn and slow chanter That might continue, hold, dispel, appease: Vowels ploughed into other, opened ground, Each verse returning like the plough turned round.

Seamus Heaney (1939-2013)

from Opened Ground

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Glanmore Sonnet I . Vowels ploughed into other: opened ground. The mildest February for twenty years Is mist bands over furrows, a deep no sound Vulnerable to distant gargling tractors. Our road is steaming, the turned-up acres breathe. Now the good life could be to cross a field And art a paradigm of earth new from the lathe Of ploughs. My lea is deeply tilled. Old ploughsocks gorge the subsoil of each sense And I am quickened with a redolence Of farmland as a dark unblown rose. Wait then...Breasting the mist, in sowers’ aprons, My ghosts come striding into their spring stations. The dream grain whirls like freakish Easter snows.

Seamus Heaney (1939-2013)

from Opened Ground

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Oh, I could write a sonnet

About your Easter bonnet

Easter Parade, 1948

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Amoretti XXII . This holy season, fit to fast and pray, Men to devotion ought to be inclin'd: Therefore I likewise on so holy day, For my sweet saint some service fit will find. Her temple fair is built within my mind, In which her glorious image placed is, On which my thoughts do day and night attend, Like sacred priests that never think amiss. There I to her as th' author of my bliss, Will build an altar to appease her ire: And on the same my heart will sacrifice, Burning in flames of pure and chaste desire: The which vouchsafe, O goddess, to accept, Amongst thy dearest relics to be kept.

Edmund Spenser (1552-1599)

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Shakespeare's Sonnet 20, performed by Rufus Wainwright

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A woman's face with nature's own hand painted, Hast thou, the master mistress of my passion; A woman's gentle heart, but not acquainted With shifting change, as is false women's fashion: An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling, Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth; A man in hue, all 'hues' in his controlling, Which steals men's eyes and women's souls amazeth. And for a woman wert thou first created; Till Nature, as she wrought thee, fell a-doting, And by addition me of thee defeated, By adding one thing to my purpose nothing. But since she prick'd thee out for women's pleasure, Mine be thy love and thy love's use their treasure.

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Sonnet . All we need is fourteen lines, well, thirteen now, and after this one just a dozen to launch a little ship on love's storm-tossed seas, then only ten more left like rows of beans. How easily it goes unless you get Elizabethan and insist the iambic bongos must be played and rhymes positioned at the ends of lines, one for every station of the cross. But hang on here wile we make the turn into the final six where all will be resolved, where longing and heartache will find an end, where Laura will tell Petrarch to put down his pen, take off those crazy medieval tights, blow out the lights, and come at last to bed.

Billy Collins (b. 1941)