Sonnet 301
William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought,
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,
And weep afresh love’s long since cancelled woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish’d sight,
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restored, and sorrows end.
London 1802
William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
Oh! raise us up, return to us again;
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.
Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart;
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea:
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,
So didst thou travel on life’s common way,
In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart
The lowest duties on herself did lay.
I Years had been from Home
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
I years had been from home,
And now before the door,
I dared not open, lest a face
I never saw before
Stare vacant into mine
And ask my business there.
My business—just a life I left,
Was such still dwelling there?
I fumbled at my nerve,
I scanned the windows near;
The silence like an ocean rolled,
And broke against my ear.
I laughed a wooden laugh
That I could fear a door,
Who danger and the dead had faced,
But never quaked before,
I fitted to the latch
My hand, with trembling care,
Lest back the awful door should spring,
And leave me standing there.
I moved my fingers off
As cautiously as glass,
And held my ears, and like a thief
Fled gasping from the house.
Half-Moon Cay
Catharine Savage Brosman2
I’ve seen this isle before, with him I name
my Great Companion. To return, retrace
our path, is tribute. Nothing is the same,
though; I cannot be two, nor reap the grace
of hands together when I am alone,
not even under palms. I must invent
a dialogue without his voice, the tone
of tenderness he used, and represent
a living body to the distant dead,
remembering that we were amnestied,
a happy paragon, the double-wed,
appointed to procure each other’s ease,
a gift—while, fatally, accompanied
by horns of sadness sounding through dark trees.
1 Editors’ Note: All punctuation is sic.
2 Catharine Savage Brosman is professor emerita of French at Tulane University; [email protected]. She is the author of fifteen collections of poetry, the latest of which is Aerosols and Other Poems (2023) from Green Altar Books, an imprint of Shotwell Publishing, Brosman’s poetry has appeared regularly in AQ, along with her article “Poetry and Western Civilization,” in the spring of 2023. In our winter 2023 issue she reviewed Jonathan Chaves’s Surfing the Torrent in “Poetry and the Human Experience.”
Photo by Valentina Ivanova on Unsplash
