Poetry Foundation
Poetry Magazine
November 2008
Poems by Roberto Bolaño, Billy Collins, Elaine Equi, Philip Levine, Mary Szybist, and others; a visual poetry portfolio edited by Geof Huth; Adam Kirsch; and more More
Archive: Reading Guides

11.19.08: Reading Guide


‘Time to Come’ will strike new readers because of its traditional poetic form. “We are just not prepared to hear rhyme and meter from Whitman, our first great free-verse poet.” David Baker looks at one of Walt Whitman’s earliest poems.
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Time to Come
BY Walt Whitman
O, Death! a black and pierceless pall
    Hangs round thee, and the future state;
No eye may see, no mind may grasp
    That mystery of fate.

This braid, which now alternate throbs
    With swelling hope and gloomy fear;
This heart, with all the changing hues,
    That mortal passions bear—

This curious frame of human mould,
    Where unrequited cravings play,
This brain, and heart, and wondrous form
    Must all alike decay.

The leaping blood will stop its flow;
    The hoarse death-struggle pass; the cheek
Lay bloomless, and the liquid tongue
    Will then forget to speak.

The grave will tame me; earth will close
    O’er cold dull limbs and ashy face;
But where, O, Nature, where shall be
    The soul’s abiding place?

Will it e’en live? For though its light
    Must shine till from the body town;
Then, when the oil of life is spent,
    Still shall the taper burn?

O, powerless is this struggling brain
    To rend the mighty mystery;
In dark, uncertain awe it waits
    The common doom, to die.


Reading Guides

Margaret Avison
How Margaret Avison balances image, thought, and story to convey the numinous in her "New Year's Poem."

Linda Bierds
A poet who evokes memories of a lost world.

Elizabeth Bishop
How Elizabeth Bishop devoted 20 years to immortalizing a moment in her classic poem "The Moose."

Robert Browning
In the realm of the world-class talkers.

Lucille Clifton
Lucille Clifton's poem "brothers" shines a bright new light on Lucifer, who answers God in a whirlwind of verse.

Hart Crane
Hart Crane's tour de force of homosexual love.

James Dickey
Was James Dickey writing about bestiality just for kicks, or was he attempting to revive the pastoral tradition?

Emily Dickinson
The music in Emily Dickinson's poetry of adolescent angst.

John Donne
"The Sun Rising" is so romantic it is almost hard to read.

Robert Duncan
On Robert Duncan’s incantatory summons.

Nikky Finney
Nikky Finney's American nightmare.

Robert Hass
Robert Hass, Baudelaire, Marx, and a bomb-building anarchist.

Robert Hayden
A lost father warms a house in "Those Winter Sundays."

Seamus Heaney
A highly reader-friendly explanation of an Irish war elegy by the most popular living poet in our language. Master a masterpiece in one easy sitting.

Philip Larkin
Philip Larkin swings.

Robert Lowell
Robert Lowell, “Skunk Hour,” and the making of a new American poetics.

Josephine Miles
Josephine Miles' overlooked lyric masterpiece "Cage" depicts a feuding couple and the dreamy freedom just outside their door.

Linda Pastan
Linda Pastan captures the sound of mortality in “The Deathwatch Beetle,” echoing Poe's “The Tell-Tale Heart.”

Sylvia Plath
The incinerating vision of Sylvia Plath’s “Fever 103°.”

Alexander Pope
How the poems of 18th century poet Alexander Pope prefigured modern hip-hop rivalries.

Donald Revell
On Donald Revell's Rust Belt poems.

Stevie Smith
"Not Waving but Drowning" finds its author not raving but frowning.

May Swenson
The eerie authenticity of May Swenson’s “Bleeding.”

César Vallejo
The ambassador of South American surrealism.

Walt Whitman
In the little-known "Time to Come," a rather goth young rhyming Romantic shows the first stirrings of genius.

William Carlos Williams
Just what does depend on that old wheelbarrow, anyway?


Rx for the Perplexed

How to Read a Poem (and Fall in Love with Poetry)


Curious about poetry, but don't know where or how to begin? We've reprinted the first chapter from the book How to Read a Poem by Edward Hirsch. Its 16 sections provide strategies for reading poems, and each section has plenty of links to examples of poems in our archive to illustrate the points.




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Events
Poetry and contratiempo Present:
A bilingual reading featuring the work of
Roberto Bolaño, Jorge Sánchez, and more
November 19, 7:00 PM, Café Efebos

Art Beyond Borders: Paul Muldoon
Thursday, November 20, 6 PM

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