Editors’ Note on the New Revised Edition viii
Acknowledgments x
Introduction by Yu Kwang-chung xi
Preface xix
I Portraits
3 1 William Shakespeare: My Mistress’ Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun
7 2 Anonymous: My Love in Her Attire
11 3 Robert Herrick: Upon Her Feet
15 4 Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Fable
21 5 Alfred Tennyson: The Eagle
25 6 Emily Dickinson: I’m Nobody!
29 7 Dorothy Parker: The Very Rich Man
33 8 Ogden Nash: The Purist
37 9 Richard Armour: The Ant
41 10 Gwendolyn Brooks: The Bean Eaters
II Between Man and Woman
47 11 Edward Herbert: Inconstancy’s the Greatest of Sins
51 12 Thomas Moore: Did Not
57 13 John Boyle O’Reilly: A White Rose
61 14 A. E. Housman: When I Was One-and-Twenty
65 15 W. B. Yeats: When You Are Old
69 16 Frances Cornford: The Guitarist Tunes Up
73 17 Greg Moss: Logodrama
III Parents and Children, Teachers and Students
81 18 Theresa Helburn: Mother
85 19 Robert Penn Warren: Old Photograph of the Future
91 20 Theodore Roethke: My Papa’s Waltz
95 21 Robert Hayden: Those Winter Sundays
99 22 Donald Hall: My Son, My Executioner
103 23 Seamus Heaney: Mother of the Groom
107 24 Walt Whitman: When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer
111 25 Tom Romano: The Teacher
IV Life and Aspiration
119 26 Walter Savage Landor: Plays
123 27 Emily Dickinson: Success Is Counted Sweetest
127 28 Emily Dickinson: Hope Is the Thing with Feathers
131 29 Robert Frost: Fire and Ice
135 30 John Masefield: Sea Fever
139 31 Robert Francis: The Hound
143 32 Stevie Smith: Not Waving but Drowning
147 33 Richard Wilbur: Parable
151 34 Linda Pastan: Ethics
V Time, Nature
159 35 William Wordsworth: My Heart Leaps Up
163 36 Robert Frost: Nothing Gold Can Stay
167 37 Robert Frost: Dust of Snow
171 38 Louis Untermeyer: Long Feud
177 39 Sylvia Plath: Frog Autumn
181 40 James Simmons: A Birthday Poem
VI About Creation
187 41 Marianne Moore: Poetry
191 42 Edna St. Vincent Millay: To a Young Poet
195 43 Richard Wilbur: The Writer
201 44 Denise Levertov: The Secret
207 45 A. R. Ammons: Unsaid
213 46 John Hollander: A One-line Poem
217 47 D. C. Berry: Fish-poetry reading
221 48 Larry Rubin: God Opens His Mail
227 49 Linda Pastan: Prosody 101
233 50 Richard Jones: The Bell
237 Appendices
245 Bibliography
247 Index of Authors, Titles, and First Lines
I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
I must go down to the seas again to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the
wind’s like a whetted knife:
我一定得再次出海,因為那奔騰潮水的呼籲
是那樣粗猶而清晰得叫人無法峻拒;
我一定得再次出海,重做那流浪的吉普賽,
重回鷗鯨出沒、風吹如刀的大海: