poetry assignment due in 30 hours

I NEVER lost as much but twice,

And that was in the sod;

Twice have I stood a beggar

Before the door of God!

Angels, twice descending,

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Reimbursed my store.

Burglar, banker, father,

I am poor once more!

I LIKE a look of agony,

Because I know it’s true;

Men do not sham convulsion,

Nor simulate a throe.

The eyes glaze once, and that is death.

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Impossible to feign

The beads upon the forehead

By homely anguish strung.

WILD nights! Wild nights!

Were I with thee,

Wild nights should be

Our luxury!

Futile the winds

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To a heart in port,—

Done with the compass,

Done with the chart.

Rowing in Eden!

Ah! the sea!

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Might I but moor

To-night in thee!

THERE’S a certain slant of light,

On winter afternoons,

That oppresses, like the weight

Of cathedral tunes.

Heavenly hurt it gives us;

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We can find no scar,

But internal difference

Where the meanings are.

None may teach it anything,

’T is the seal, despair,—

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An imperial affliction

Sent us of the air.

When it comes, the landscape listens,

Shadows hold their breath;

When it goes, ’t is like the distance

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On the look of death.

I FELT a funeral in my brain,

  And mourners, to and fro,

Kept treading, treading, till it seemed

  That sense was breaking through.

And when they all were seated,

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  A service like a drum

Kept beating, beating, till I thought

  My mind was going numb.

And then I heard them lift a box,

  And creak across my soul

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With those same boots of lead, again.

  Then space began to toll

As all the heavens were a bell,

  And Being but an ear,

And I and silence some strange race,

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  Wrecked, solitary, here.

I ’M nobody! Who are you?

Are you nobody, too?

Then there ’s a pair of us—don’t tell!

They ’d banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!

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How public, like a frog

To tell your name the livelong day

To an admiring bog!

I HEARD a fly buzz when I died;

  The stillness round my form

Was like the stillness in the air

  Between the heaves of storm.

The eyes beside had wrung them dry,

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  And breaths were gathering sure

For that last onset, when the king

  Be witnessed in his power.

I willed my keepsakes, signed away

  What portion of me I

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Could make assignable,—and then

  There interposed a fly,

With blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz,

  Between the light and me;

And then the windows failed, and then

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  I could not see to see.

I LIKE to see it lap the miles,

And lick the valleys up,

And stop to feed itself at tanks;

And then, prodigious, step

Around a pile of mountains,

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And, supercilious, peer

In shanties by the sides of roads;

And then a quarry pare

To fit its sides, and crawl between,

Complaining all the while

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In horrid, hooting stanza;

Then chase itself down hill

And neigh like Boanerges;

Then, punctual as a star,

Stop—docile and omnipotent—

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At its own stable door.

BECAUSE I could not stop for Death,

He kindly stopped for me;

The carriage held but just ourselves

And Immortality.

We slowly drove, he knew no haste,

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And I had put away

My labor, and my leisure too,

For his civility.

We passed the school where children played

At wrestling in a ring;

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We passed the fields of gazing grain,

We passed the setting sun.

We paused before a house that seemed

A swelling of the ground;

The roof was scarcely visible,

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The cornice but a mound.

Since then ’t is centuries; but each

Feels shorter than the day

I first surmised the horses’ heads

Were toward eternity.

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