Tim Miller

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    • #223 – How to write two novels at the same time, with Charles Dickens

      An episode from 1/10/23: Tonight we take a peek into the creative life of Charles Dickens (1812-1870). Through a handful of readings from Claire Tomalin’s biography of Dickens, we see how he was able to juggle, for almost a year, the writing of two novels for simultaneous serial publication. Then, thanks to a letter written…

    • #222: Seamus Heaney 10 Essential Poems

      An episode from 8/25/23: Tonight, I read ten essential poems from one of the great and most public poets of the last seventy years, Seamus Heaney (1939-2013). It isn’t hard to come by details of Heaney’s life, but ⁠Stepping Stones⁠ (where Heaney is interviewed at length in what amounts to an autobiography), is a good…

    • #221: Volcanoes, Plagues & the Childhood of a Kabbalist

      An episode from 3/16/26: Tonight, I read about the eruption of the volcano Krakatoa in the year 535 CE, and the outbreak of plague in Constantinople (and elsewhere) only a few years later. It all comes from Susan Wise Bauer’s The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade,…

    • 4 Severed Head Songs: New Poems at The Brazen Head

      Many thanks to Liam Guilar, poetry editor at The Brazen Head, who just published four poems of mine. You can read them here. As my note to the poems says, they come from my much-longer upcoming book, The Great Year, and the poems are spoken by a preserved severed head, named John, hence their ecstatic/puzzling…

    • #220: The working poor, and a so-so murder show

      An episode from 3/9/26: Tonight, I read from Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2001 book Nickle and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America. After that, I talk about the recent TV show The Killing, as a way in to talking about our obsession and desire for criticism, objectivity, and certainty. Isn’t privacy and the subjective more fruitful?…

    • #219: When a paragraph changes your life

      An episode from 3/2/26: Tonight, I read a single paragraph from two books that each had a profound effect on my understanding of religion, creativity, and a great deal else. The first comes from page one of Mircea Eliade’s History of Religious Ideas, and the second from John Eliot Gardiner’s Johann Sebastian Bach: Music in…

    • The first review of “Time & the River” is in

      Many thanks to David Rullo of the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle. You can read his review of Time and the River here or by scrolling down. Don’t forget to order your copy here, leave a review, or even suggest that your local library get a copy. Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle: Time and the River is a historical…

    • “Time & the River” is now available!

      Time & the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire ORDER FROM AMAZON Thanks to everyone who preordered the book. Please consider sharing, leaving a review on Amazon, or requesting your local library get a copy. What lasts, and what endures? Through more than fifty poems, the first volume of Time and the River…

    • #218: Poetry to Live By

      An episode from 2/23/2026: My new book of poetry, Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, is finally out. I spend this episode talking briefly about how always having the writing or reading of poetry close at hand and close in mind, has saved my life many times. I also read…

    • The Old Gods: Sucellus, the Wine God (poem & video)

      Looking ahead to the February 23 release of Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, I will be posting poems from it with accompanying videos. You can preorder the book here and see all videos and reviews of here. Today’s poem is the first in a series about the gods of…

    • The Old Gods: Esus with an Axe (poem & video)

      Looking ahead to the February 23 release of Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, I will be posting poems from it with accompanying videos. You can preorder the book here and see all videos and reviews of here. Today’s poem is the first in a series about the gods of…

    • #217: Voices from 1900-1914

      An episode from 1/2/23: Tonight, I read a handful of voices from those living in Europe and the United States between 1900 and 1914. Rephrased only slightly, nearly all of their concerns (over technology, gender, nationalism, war, eugenics) feel like they could appear in the news or on the street today. Then and now, what…

    • The Death of the Richest Man in Rome (poem & video)

      Looking ahead to the February 23 release of Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, I will be posting poems from it with accompanying videos. You can preorder the book here and see all videos and reviews of here. Today’s poem is about the execution of one of ancient Rome’s richest…

    • Roman Execution Steps (poem & video)

      Looking ahead to the February 23 release of Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, I will be posting poems from it with accompanying videos. You can preorder the book here and see all videos and reviews of here. Today’s poem is about one of ancient Rome’s places of execution, “The…

    • Trajan’s Bridge (poem & video)

      Looking ahead to the February 23 release of Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, I will be posting poems from it with accompanying videos. You can preorder the book here and see all videos and reviews of here. Today’s poem is “Trajan’s Bridge“:

    • A Roman Soldier from the Time of Nero (poem & video)

      Looking ahead to the February 23 release of Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, I will be posting poems from it with accompanying videos. You can preorder the book here and see all videos and reviews of here. Today’s poem is “Mr Cassian’s Good Friend, a Roman Soldier“:

    • #216: Poets, Prophets, Seeresses & Goddesses from “Time & the River”

      An episode from 2/9/2026: This is the second episode where I read from my upcoming book Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, which comes out on February 23. This time, I read seven of my favorite poems from the point of view of women. They are: As I mention, more…

    • Morgan le Fay Speaks (poem & video)

      Looking ahead to the February 23 release of Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, I will be posting poems from it with accompanying videos. You can preorder the book here and see all videos and reviews of here. Today’s poem is “Morgan le Fay“:

    • The Earliest English Poet (poem & video)

      Looking ahead to the February 23 release of Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, I will be posting poems from it with accompanying videos. You can preorder the book here and see all videos and reviews of here. Today’s poem is “Caedmon Comes to Singing“:

    • The Norse Seeress Speaks (poem & video)

      Looking ahead to the February 23 release of Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, I will be posting poems from it with accompanying videos. You can preorder the book here and see all videos and reviews of here. Today’s poem is “Völva,” one of the words in the Eddic poems…

    • Placenta / 16th century country birth (poem & video)

      Looking ahead to the February 23 release of Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, I will be posting poems from it with accompanying videos. You can preorder the book here and see all videos and reviews of here. Today’s poem is “Placenta“:

    • #215: 8 Favorite Poems from “Time & the River”

      An episode from 2/2/2026: For the next few episodes I’ll be reading poems from my book Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, which comes out on February 23. As the title says, it begins with the Columbine high school shooting in 1999 and travels back to the invention of fire…

    • The River Acheron, in Dante’s Hell (poem & video)

      Looking ahead to the February 23 release of Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, I will be posting poems from it with accompanying videos. You can preorder the book here and see all videos and reviews of here. For trivia lovers out there, “The River Acheron, in Dante’s Hell” is…

    • The Execution of Sir Walter Raleigh (poem & video)

      Looking ahead to the February 23 release of Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, I will be posting poems from it with accompanying videos. You can preorder the book here and see all videos and reviews of here. Today’s poem, on the execution of Sir Walter Raleigh, is “The Historian“:

    • How the KGB Spies on a Moscow Apartment (poem & video)

      Looking ahead to the February 23 release of Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, I will be posting poems from it with accompanying videos. You can preorder the book here and see all videos and reviews of here. Today’s poem is “Moscow, 1985“:

    • “Those in the Jebel Sahaba Cemetery” (poem & video)

      Looking ahead to the February release of Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, I will be posting poems from it with accompanying videos. You can preorder the book here and see all videos and reviews of here. Today’s poem is “Those in the Jebel Sahaba Cemetery.” (For more information about…

    • #214: Two of the Best Poems You’ve Never Heard of (by William Cullen Bryant)

      An episode from 1/26/2026: Tonight, I read two poems from the American poet William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878), “Earth” and “The River, by Night.” Just as with the episode on Bryant’s life from earlier this month, I hope this episode brings his writing and poetry to the attention of more readers. The best way to support…

    • “The Boys of Sumer” (from the Akkadian)

      One of the earliest surviving laments in world literature, “The Boys of Sumer” remains an outlier of the genre. Few other poems from the Babylonian corpus include so much: aspects of contemporary life, magic, dreams, among the earliest recorded use of colorful insults, and unrequited love. There is also some indication that this poem would…

    • “Abraham with Isaac” (poem & video)

      Looking ahead to the February release of Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, I will be posting poems from it with accompanying videos. You can preorder the book here and see all videos and reviews of here. Today’s poem is “Abraham with Isaac”:

    • “Moses” (poem & video)

      Looking ahead to the February release of Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, I will be posting poems from it with accompanying videos. You can preorder the book here and see all videos and reviews of here. Today’s poem “Moses”:

    • “Cauldron & Drink” (poem & video)

      Looking ahead to the February release of Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, I will be posting poems from it with accompanying videos. You can preorder the book here and see all videos and reviews of here. Today’s poem “Cauldron & Drink”:

    • #213: Van Gogh’s Early Years

      An episode from 12/7/22: This week, I am reposting what is perhaps my favorite episode of Human Voices Wake Us, first posted back in late 2022. We enter into the early years of Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), from his birth in the village of Zundert in the Netherlands, to his time in the Borinage mining…

    • “The Invention of Fire” (poem & video)

      Looking ahead to the February release of Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, I will be posting poems from it with accompanying videos. You can preorder the book here and see all videos and reviews of here. Today’s poem Fire:

    • “Shakespeare Mourns Hamnet” (poem & video)

      Looking ahead to the February release of Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, I will be posting poems from it with accompanying videos. You can preorder the book here and see all videos and reviews of here. Today’s poem is an excerpt from a long poem about Shakespeare; here, he…

    • “Emily Dickinson Does Not Need Visitors” (poem & video)

      Looking ahead to the February release of Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, I will be posting poems from it with accompanying videos. You can preorder the book here and see all videos and reviews of here. Today’s poem is “Mr Cassian’s Good Friend, Emily Dicksinson“:

    • #212 – The Most Popular Story in Ancient India

      An episode from 1/12/2026: Tonight, I read from the oldest religious poetry from India, the collection of 1,028 ritual hymns known as the The Rig Veda. Specifically, I read from the most popular story found there, the defeat of the serpent Vrtra by the god Indra and the freeing of the waters of the world.…

    • #211 – Who Was William Cullen Bryant?

      An episode from 1/5/2026: Tonight, I read a handful of passages from Gilbert Muller’s William Cullen Bryant: Author of America. During his lifetime, Bryant (1794-1878) was the most popular poet in America as well as one of the country’s most trusted and influential editors and journalists. Through Bryant’s own words and those of his contemporaries,…

    • #210 – Memories & Legends of William Shakespeare

      An episode from 12/28/25: What was it like to know Shakespeare, to stand in the theater and watch one of his plays, to be a neighbor who knew him as a teenager? What was it like to pass through London as a student or visitor or diplomat, and note in passing that you saw Shakespeare’s…

    • #209 – Being a Jew in 1900, Being a Jew Now

      An episode from 12/15/25: Tonight, I read from Irving Howe’s World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made. In light of the events in Australia yesterday, I take the time not just to talk about what it meant to be a Jewish immigrant…

    • “Unfinished Michelangelo” (poem & video)

      Looking ahead to the February release of Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, I will be posting poems from it with accompanying videos. You can preorder the book here and see all videos and reviews of here. Today’s poem is Unfinished Michelangelo:

    • “The Sun Sets into the Sea” (poem & video)

      Looking ahead to the February release of Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, I will be posting poems from it with accompanying videos. You can preorder the book here and see all videos and reviews of here. Today’s poem is The Sun Sets Into the Sea:

    • #208 – Bach & God

      An episode from 12/1/25: Note: A version of this episode was posted last week and quickly taken down when I realized the audio quality was poor. I have rerecorded it here; apologies to those listeners who heard the subpar version. Tonight, I read from John Eliot’s Gardiner’s Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven. Gardiner…

    • “Vermeer’s The Milkmaid” (poem & video)

      Looking ahead to the February release of Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, I will be posting poems from it with accompanying videos. You can preorder the book here and see all videos and reviews of here. Today’s poem is Vermeer’s “The Milkmaid”:

    • #207 – Death, the Gods, and Endless Life in Ancient Egypt

      An episode from 11/24/25: Tonight, I read from one of the best books on religion in ancient Egypt, Erik Hornung’s Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: The One and the Many. Few have written so lucidly on the subject: Egyptians were actually obsessed with life and its renewal, not in wallowing death; the “monotheistic” reforms…

    • YouTube is Censoring… Poetry?

      As I began to plan the February release of my new book, Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, the one obvious way of promoting it was to create YouTube videos for many of the book’s poems. A few weeks ago, I posted the first of these, “Edward Hopper’s ‘Nighthawks’” and…

    • “Mr Cassian’s Good Friend, Albert Einstein” (poem & video)

      Looking ahead to the February release of Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, I will be posting poems from it with accompanying videos. You can preorder the book here and see all videos and reviews of here. Today’s poem is Mr Cassian’s Good Friend, Albert Einstein:

    • “Robert Oppenheimer” (poem & video)

      Looking ahead to the February release of Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, I will be posting poems from it with accompanying videos. You can preorder the book here and see all videos and reviews of here. Today’s poem is about Robert Oppenheimer:

    • #206: The Discovery of Indo-European Languages – 1876

      An episode from 11/17/25: Tonight, I read a section from David Anthony’s book The Horse, the Wheel, and Language. It is a wonderfully written account of the archeological and linguistic attempts to discover the origins of the Indo-European language families. The part I read from retells the famous story of Sir William Jones, the Welsh…

    • “Dylan Klebold’s Crush” (poem & video)

      Looking ahead to the February release of Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, I will be posting poems from it with accompanying videos. You can preorder the book here and see all videos and reviews of here. Today’s poem is the first in the book, and one of the hardest…

    • #205: Learning to Read, c. 2000 BCE

      An episode from 11/10/25: Tonight, I talk about literacy and education in the ancient world, both the fascinating aspects of memorization and of what “reading” meant back (it was much closer to reading shorthand today), and the precarious reality that anyone who underwent scribal training in Mesopotamia or Egypt might not even live long enough…

    • “Merlin” (poem & video)

      Looking ahead to the February release of Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, I will be posting poems from it with accompanying videos. You can preorder the book here and see all videos and reviews of here. The first poem to share is on that great figure from Arthurian myth,…

    • #204: Walt Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” 1856

      An episode from 11/3/25: Tonight, I read what is perhaps Walt Whitman’s greatest poem, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” I also set it in the context of Whitman’s life as a poet: he wrote and published the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855 and was certain that the book would have an immediate cultural and…

    • #203: Bruce Springsteen Talks About “Nebraska” – 1984

      An episode from 10/24/25: I’ve been waiting in vain for a cold to pass so I can record a new episode. As that doesn’t seem to be happening anytime soon, the new movie about Bruce Springsteen reminded me that a few years ago I recorded an episode about his 1982 album Nebraska. While the original…

    • #202: A Death at Sea, 1834

      An episode from 10/6/25: Tonight, I read from Richard Henry Dana Jr.’s Two Years Before the Mast, first published in 1840. It tells of the death of one sailor, George Ballmer. The text of this passage can be found here. I also read a quote from the poet Derek Walcott, and part of the poem…

    • #201: Gillian Anderson, & What Women Want, 2024

      An episode from 9/25/25: Tonight, I read a few entries from the book Gillian Anderson edited, called Want: Sexual Fantasies by Anonymous. It is a collection of sexual fantasies from women all over the world, but as I point out, behind the acrobatics and explicitness of what we assume fantasy to be all about, a…

    • #200: The Last Days of Walter Benjamin, 1940

      An episode from 9/15/25: Tonight, I read a long section on the last days of the philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) from the biography Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life, by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. (For those who are interested, the BBC’s In Our Time devotes an entire hour to Benjamin’s life and work.) I…

    • #199: The Protestant Reformation Gets Going, c. 1517

      An episode from 9/9/25: Tonight, I read from three books: The best way to support the podcast is by leaving a review on Apple or Spotify, sharing it with others, or sending me a note on what you think. You can also order any of my books: Time and the River: From Columbine to the…

    • #198: Georgia O’Keeffe Finds Herself in the Fall of 1915

      An episode from 9/1/25: Tonight, I read a small passage from Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf, and then a much longer passage from Laurie Lisle’s Portrait of an Artist: A Biography of Georgia O’Keeffe. In it, Lisle describes the weeks and months in late 1915 during which O’Keeffe found herself as an artist after her decision to…

    • #197: A Honeymoon in the House of the Dead in Ancient Mesopotamia, c. 2300 BCE

      An episode from 8/27/25: Tonight, I read from Amanda Podany’s wonderful book, Weavers, Scribes, and Kings: A New History of the Ancient Near East. After a royal wedding took place in the ancient Syrian city of Ebla around 2300 BCE, the new king and queen spent no less than three weeks among the tombs and…

    • #196: Morning at the London Docks, c. 1850

      An episode from 8/23/25: Returning to the podcast after a long hiatus, I read from Henry Mayhew and John Binny’s London Labour and the London Poor, their exhaustive and essential description of life in London for the working poor in the mid-nineteenth century. Far from being a dry and distant document, it is a work…

    • Oppenheimer & the Bomb (from the archive)

      An episode from 7/21/23: Tonight, I read a few dozen quotations from the scientists, politicians, and military figures who were instrumental in the development of the atomic bomb, and in the final decision to drop it on Japan in August of 1945. The most prominent voices here are those of Robert Oppenheimer and his fellow…

    • Robert Oppenheimer (poem)

      Robert Oppenheimer Now I come to write in light and firein a language of power we all know,beyond every letter and poetryand all the dithering of philosophy,all the prevarication of politics.The physicists have known sin, it’s true,but also the brilliance of a burden overcome in the ageless mountains,a foul display that was beyond awesome,beyond my…

    • “Bone Antler Stone” is 70% off at Amazon

      For the next few weeks, my book of poems on prehistoric Europe, Bone Antler Stone, will be 70% off at Amazon–in other words, only $3.50. Click here to order it Read a few reviews about the book below, or listen to a podcast of readings from it: Passing through more than thirty thousand years of…

    • “The One Who Sang So Well” (new story)

      An episode from 6/15/25: Tonight, the podcast returns briefly for a reading of my new short story, “The One Who Sang So Well.” The episode coincides with the story’s publication in The Basilisk Tree—you can read it here. Many thanks to editor Bryan Helton for taking the story. You can support Human Voices Wake Us here,…

    • New Podcast Announcement – “Savage Amazement”

      Hello everyone! I’m excited to announce a new podcast that that artist and teacher Tom Hart and I have started. It is called Savage Amazement, where we talk about being modern guys, about living inside of creativity, longing, and caring about art and meaning. For the moment, the podcast is being housed at Tom’s Substack,…

    • Shakespeare: The Life & Times (from the archive)

      An episode from 10/16/23: Tonight, I read my long poem about William Shakespeare, and offer a commentary along the way. It is being published simultaneously at Bryan Helton’s ⁠The Basilisk Tree⁠, and once again I give Bryan my infinite thanks. This will be the third long poem of mine that he has published this year…

    • Allen Ginsberg, “Blessed be the Muses”

      Blessed be the Muses for their descent, dancing round my desk,crowning my balding head with Laurel. 1955 Allen Ginsberg, 1926-1998 – “Blessed be the Muses” from Collected Poems 1947-1997

    • Ted Hughes, “Rain”

      Rain. Floods. Frost. And after frost, rain.Dull roof-drumming. Wraith-rain pulsing across purplebare woodsLike light across heaved water. Sleet in it.And the poor fields, miserable tents of their hedges.Mist-rain off-world. Hills wallowingIn and out of a grey or silvery dissolution. A farm gleaming,Then all dull in the near drumming. At field-cornersBrown water backing and brimming in…

    • Mary Oliver, “Wild Geese”

      You do not have to be good.You do not have to walk on your kneesFor a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.Meanwhile the world goes on.Meanwhile the sun and the clear…

    • Seamus Heaney, 3 Poems from “Squarings”

      Squarings #2Roof it again. Batten down. Dig in.Drink out of tin. Know the scullery cold,A latch, a door-bar, forged tongs and a grate.Touch the cross-beam, drive iron in a wall,Hang a line to verify the plumbFrom lintel, coping-stone and chimney-breast.Relocate the bedrock in the threshold.Take squarings from the recessed gable pane.Make your study the unregarded…

    • Sharon Olds, “The Connoisseuse of Slugs”

      When I was a connoisseuse of slugsI would part the ivy leaves, and look for thenaked jelly of those gold bodies,translucent strangers glistening along thestones, slowly, their gelatinous bodiesat my mercy. Made mostly of water, they would shrivelto nothing if they were sprinkled with salt,but I was not interested in that. What I likedwas to…

    • Louise Glück, “Matins” and “Vespers”

      MatinsForgive me if I say I love you: the powerfulare always lied to since the weak are alwaysdriven by panic. I cannot lovewhat I can’t conceive, and you disclosevirtually nothing: are you like the hawthorn tree,always the same thing in the same place,or are you more the foxglove, inconsistent, first springing upa pink spike on…

    • Eavan Boland, “The Making of an Irish Goddess”

      Ceres went to hellwith no sense of time.When she looked backall that she could see wasthe arteries of silver in the rock,the diligence of rivers always at one level,wheat at one height,leaves of a single colour,the same distance in the usual light;a seasonless, unscarred earth.But I need time –my flesh and that history –to make…

    • Laurie Sheck, “The Subway Platform”

      And then the gray concrete of the subway platform, that shore stripped of all premise of softnessor repose. I stood there, beneath the city’s sequential grids and frameworks, its wrappings and unwrappingslike a robe sewn with birds that flew into seasons of light, a robe of goldand then a robe of ash.All around me were…

    • How Death Comes (a poem from 1250)

      Thanks to everyone who has been reading and commenting on the Daily Poems. It takes a few months to work backward from twentieth century poems to some of the earliest English verse. Dating to the year 1250 or so, today’s poem is the last from this round; tomorrow, we will swing back to the twentieth…

    • Anthology: Poems for Spring (from the archive)

      An episode from 3/12/23: Tonight, I return to new episodes with a handful of poems about the spring. As I mention, living as I do in a city usually inundated with snow, it has been bizarre to have not shoveled the driveway even once. And since the next few weeks of episodes are already planned…

    • A Love Poem that Still Stings After 700 Years

      from “The white beauty,” c. 1300Herkneth me, I ou telle. In such wondring for wo I welle; Nis no fur so hot in helle All to monThat loveth derne and dar nout telle Whet him is on. Hear me, I tell you. I suffer for sorrow in such distress of mind. There is no fire…

    • Shopping for books?

      If you enjoy receiving daily poems from me… or listening to my podcast… if you’re into ancient history or the American Civil War… if you enjoy archaeology or religion or even short stories… you’ll probably be into at least one of my books. Give them a look, order a few, pass them around. There (might)…

    • An anonymous poem of incredible cynicism, from c. 1325

      Lollay, lollay, little child, why wepestou so sore? Nedes mostou wepe – it was iyarked thee yoreEver to lib in sorow, and sich and mourne evere, As thine eldren did er this, whil hi alives were. Lollay, lollay, little child, child, lollay, lullow, Into uncuth world icommen so ertou. Lollay, lollay, little child, why do…

    • Geoffrey Chaucer, “Ballade to Rosamund”

      Madame, ye ben of al beaute shryneAs fer as cercled is the mapamounde, map of the worldFor as the cristal glorious ye shyne,And lyke ruby ben your chekes rounde.Therwith ye ben so mery and so jocoundeThat at a revel whan that I see you daunce,It is an oynement unto my wounde,Thogh ye to me ne…

    • The Great Myths #24: Sigurd & the Dragon (from the archive)

      An episode from 5/20/24: Tonight, after a long hiatus, we return to Norse myth with the story of Sigurd’s killing of the dragon, Fafnir. Couched in a much longer narrative that contains shape-shifting, war, revenge, brief appearances by Odin and Loki, and finally Sigurd’s ability to hear the language of birds and animals, it is…

    • “Smoke-blackened smiths” (an anonymous poem from c. 1450)

      Swart-smecked smethe, smatered with smoke, Smoke-blackened smiths, begrimed with smoke,Drive me to deth with den of here dintes: drive me to death with the din of their blows:Swich nois on nightes ne herd men never, such noise by night no man ever heard,What knavene cry and clattering of knockes! what crying of workmen and clattering…

    • “A Friar Complains” (anonymous poem from c. 1500)

      Alas! what shul we freres do,Now lewed men cun Holy Writ? cun/knowAlle aboute where I go They aposen me of it. They confront me with hard questions about itThen wondreth me that it is so,How lewed men cun alle wit. Sertely, we be undoBut if we mo amende it.I trowe the devil brought it aboute,To…

    • 2 Early Versions of “The Holly and the Ivy”

      from c. 1525: Holly against Ivy Nay! nay! Ivy, It may not be, iwis: iwis/indeed For Holy must have the mastry, As the maner is. Holy bereth beris, Beris rede inough: The thristilcok, the popingay cock thrush, the parrot (?) Daunce in every bough. Welaway! sory Ivy, What fowles hast thou? But the sory owlet,…

    • Patti Smith / Mazzy Star & Living Colour / Philip Glass (from the archive)

      An episode from 11/13/23: Tonight, I talk about our attachment to music as teenagers and adults, and the lessons that loving music—and finding meaning in musicians’ life stories—can teach us. First, I read two passages from Patti Smith’s memoir, ⁠Just Kids⁠. Those parts on her early life with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, before either of…

    • Thomas Wyatt, “What does this mean?”

      What menethe this? When I lye aloneI tosse, I turne, I sighe, I grone;My bed semes as hard as stone:What menes this?I sighe, I plaine continually; The clothes that on my bed do lie Always, methinks, they lie awry: What menes this? In slumbers oft for fere I quake, For hete and cold I burne…

    • Shakespeare: 3 Sonnets on Love, Lust, and Exhaustion

      Sonnet 27Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed,The dear repose for limbs with travel tired,But then begins a journey in my headTo work my mind when body’s work’s expired.For then my thoughts, from far where I abide,Intend a zealous pilgrimage to thee,And keep my drooping eyelids open wide,Looking on darkness which the blind…

    • Shakespeare: “I stay too long by thee; I weary thee” (from Henry IV pt. 2)

      King: I stay too long by thee; I weary thee.Dost thou so hunger for mine empty chairThat thou wilt needs invest thee with my honorsBefore thy hour be ripe? O foolish youth,Thou seek’st the greatness that will overwhelm thee.Stay but a little, for my cloud of dignityIs held from falling with so weak a windThat…

    • Shakespeare: King Lear Out in the Elements

      “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow!” (King Lear III.ii) Lear: Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow!You cataracts and hurricanoes, spoutTill you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks.You sulph’rous and thought-executing fires,Vaunt-couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts,Singe my white head. And thou, all-shaking thunder,Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ th’ world.Crack nature’s molds,…

    • Great Poems: Shakespeare’s “To be or not to be” (from the archive)

      An episode from 8/12/22: Everybody knows the most famous soliloquy in all of drama, or at least the first line of it: ⁠”To be or not to be, that is the question,”⁠ from act three of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Tonight, I delve into the speech and try to figure out why it works so well not just as…

    • Shakespeare: “Are thou not sorry for these heinous deeds?”: 2 Speeches from “Titus Andronicus”

      “Art thou not sorry for these heinous deeds?” (Titus Andronicus, V.i)Lucius: Art thou not sorry for these heinous deeds?Aaron: Ay, that I had not done a thousand more.Even now I curse the day – and yet, I think,Few come within the compass of my curse –Wherein I did not some notorious ill,As kill a man,…

    • Recent Poems & Essays

      For those of you who are interested, here are a few recent poems and essays that have appeared. The full list is always here. A few poems from The Great Year: Two essays on Judaism in the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle: Other essays on poetry and history:

    • Ben Jonson, from “The Triumph of Charis”

      Have you seen but a bright lily grow, Before rude hands have touch’d it?Ha’you mark’d but the fall o’ the snow Before the soil hath smutch’d it?Ha’you felt the wool o’ the beaver? Or swan’s down ever?Or have smelt o’ the bud o’ the briar? Or the nard in the fire?Or have tasted the bag…

    • John Donne, “Death be not proud”

      Death be not proud, though some have called theeMighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not soe,For, those, whom thou think’st, thou dost overthrow,Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill mee;From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,And soonest our best men with thee doe…

    • Anthology: Visionary Poetry from Yeats, Whitman, Blake & Myth (from the archive)

      An episode from 3/3/24: Tonight, I read from a handful of what I call “visionary” poems. After an introductory section of familiar nineteenth- and twentieth-century poets, I go back to the sources of those, which are found in religious scripture and myth: You can support Human Voices Wake Us here, or by ordering any of my…

    • Henry King, “The Exequy”

      Accept, thou shrine of my dead saint,Instead of dirges, this complaint;And for sweet flow’rs to crown thy hearse,From thy griev’d friend, whom thou might’st seeQuite melted into tears for thee. Dear loss! since thy untimely fateMy task hath been to meditateOn thee, on thee; thou art the book,The library whereon I look,Though almost blind. For…

    • First Person: Voices from 1900-1914 (from the archive)

      An episode from 1/2/23: Tonight, I read a handful of voices from those living in Europe and the United States between 1900 and 1914. Rephrased only slightly, nearly all of their concerns (over technology, gender, nationalism, war, eugenics) feel like they could appear in the news or on the street today. Then and now, what…

    • George Herbert, “The Flower”

      How fresh, O Lord, how sweet and cleanAre thy returns! ev’n as the flowers in spring; To which, besides their own demean,The late-past frosts tributes of pleasure bring. Grief melts away Like snow in May, As if there were no such cold thing. Who would have thought my shrivel’d heartCould have recover’d greennesse? It was…

    • John Milton: Eve and the Serpent from “Paradise Lost”

      For now, and since first break of dawne the Fiend,Meer Serpent in appearance, forth was come,And on his Quest, where likeliest he might findeThe onely two of Mankinde, but in themThe whole included Race, his purposd prey.In Bowre and Field he sought, where any tuftOf Grove or Garden-Plot more pleasant lay,Thir tendance or Plantation for…

    • Henry Vaughan, “The Book”

      Eternal God! maker of all That have liv’d here, since the mans fall; The Rock of ages! in whose shadeThey live unseen, when here they fade. Thou knew’st this papyr, when it was Meer seed, and after that but grass; Before ’twas drest or spun, and whenMade linen, who did wear it then: What were…

    • Van Gogh’s Early Years (from the archive)

      An episode from 12/7/22: Tonight, we enter into the early years of Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), from his birth in the village of Zundert in the Netherlands, to his time in the Borinage mining region of Belgium. It was there, at the age of twenty-seven—and after years of personal and professional failures—that he hit bottom…

    • Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress”

      Had we but World enough, and Time,This coyness Lady were no crime.We would sit down, and think which wayTo walk, and pass our long Loves Day.Thou by the Indian Ganges sideShould’st Rubies find: I by the TideOf Humber would complain. I wouldLove you ten years before the Flood:And you should if you please refuseTill the…

    • Anne Finch, “Adam Pos’d”

      Cou’d our First Father, at his toilsome Plough,Thorns in his Path, and Labour on his Brow,Cloath’d only in a rude, unpolish’d Skin,Cou’d he a vain Fantastick Nymph have seen,In all her Airs, in all her antick Graces,Her various Fashions, and more various Faces;How had it pos’d that Skill, which late assign’dJust Appellations to Each several…

    • Jonathan Swift, “A Description of the Morning”

      Now hardly here and there a hackney-coachAppearing, show’d the ruddy morn’s approach.Now Betty from her master’s bed had flown,And softly stole to discompose her own.The slip-shod ’prentice from his master’s doorHad par’d the dirt, and sprinkled round the floor.Now Moll had whirl’d her mop with dext’rous airs,Prepar’d to scrub the entry and the stairs.The youth…

    • Alexander Pope, from “An Essay on Man”

      The bliss of Man (could Pride that blessing find)Is, not to think, or act, beyond Mankind;No pow’rs of Body or of Soul to share,But what his Nature and his State can bear.Why has not Man a microscopic eye?For this plain reason, Man is not a Fly.Say what the use, were finer opticks giv’n,T’ inspect a…

    • William Blake (new episode)

      An episode from 12/9/24: Tonight’s episode gathers together all of the readings I’ve done on this podcast from the poet William Blake (1757-1827). All of these poems can be found online at The Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake: Listeners will forgive me for providing an episode that isn’t quite brand new. But in…

    • Thomas Gray, “Ode on the Spring”

      Lo! where the rosy-bosomed Hours,Fair Venus’ train, appear,Disclose the long-expecting flowers,And wake the purple year!The Attic warbler pours her throat,Responsive to the cuckoo’s note,The untaught harmony of spring:While whispering pleasure as they fly,Cool zephyrs through the clear blue skyTheir gathered fragrance fling.Where’er the oak’s thick branches stretchA broader browner shade;Where’er the rude and moss-grown beechO’er-canopies…

    • Gilbert White, “The Naturalist’s Summer-Evening Walk”

      To Thomas Pennant, Esq.When day declining sheds a milder gleam, What time the may-fly haunts the pool or stream;When the still owl skims round the grassy mead, What time the timorous hare limps forth to feed;Then be the time to steal adown the vale, And listen to the vagrant cuckoo’s tale;To hear the clamorous curlew…

    • Mark Akenside, from “The Pleasures of Imagination”

      A different task remains: the secret pathsOf early genius to explore: to traceThose haunts where Fancy her predestined sons, Like to the demigods of old, doth nurse Remote from eyes profane. Ye happy souls, Who now her tender discipline obey,Where dwell ye? What wild river’s brink at eve Imprint your steps? What solemn groves at…

    • Joseph Warton, from “The Enthusiast: or The Lover of Nature”

      All-beauteous Nature! by thy boundless charms Oppressed, O where shall I begin thy praise, Where turn th’ ecstatic eye, how ease my breast That pants with wild astonishment and love!Dark forests, and the op’ning lawn, refreshed With ever-gushing brooks, hill, meadow, dale, The balmy bean-field, the gay-coloured close, So sweetly interchanged, the lowing ox, The…

    • Mary Leapor, “Mira’s Will”

      IMPRIMIS – My departed Shade I trustTo Heav’n – My Body to the silent Dust;My Name to publick Censure I submit,To be dispos’d of as the World thinks fit;My Vice and Folly let Oblivion close,The World already is o’erstock’d with those;My Wit I give, as Misers give their Store,To those who think they had enough…

    • Thomas Cole, from “The Life of Hubert”

      The time allowed for sleep at length elapsed, We, quite refreshed, awake at usual hour, Greeted with usual sounds. The swallow’s wing In chimney tunnel flutt’ring up and down, And frequent twitt’rings sweet, as bit by bit She plasters busily, with trowel bill, The rough-cast layers of her mud-wall cell.The close-grouped pigeons on the sunny…

    • Thomas Warton, “Sonnet: To the River Lodon”

      Ah! what a weary race my feet have run, Since first I trod thy banks with alders crowned, And thought my way was all through fairy ground, Beneath thy azure sky, and golden sun:Where first my Muse to lisp her notes begun! While pensive memory traces back the round, Which fills the varied interval between,…

    • John Cunningham, “Morning”

      In the barn the tenant cock, Close to partlet perched on high, Briskly crows (the shepherd’s clock!), Jocund that the morning’s nigh.Swiftly from the mountain’s brow, Shadows, nursed by night, retire:And the peeping sunbeam now Paints with gold the village spire.Philomel forsakes the thorn, Plaintive where she prates at night;And the lark, to meet the…

    • John Keats: “The poet has no identity” (from the archive)

      An episode from 5/5/21: Tonight, I read part of John Keats’s ⁠famous⁠ ⁠letter⁠ of October 27, 1818, where he talks about the poet and the poetic character. He asks the questions: how much of a poet’s life is given up by their focus on poetry, by their people-watching and -listening, by their lack of social…

    • On Cyber Monday, Remember Poetry

      If you’re buying stuff on Amazon today anyway, why not toss a S4N Pocket book into your cart while you’re at it? It’s been a joy to design these books and make them available as cheaply as possible – they are always only $3.99. Click here or on the image below to find them all.

    • Oliver Goldsmith, from “Retaliation”

      Here lies David Garrick, describe me who can, An abridgment of all that was pleasant in man; As an actor, confest without rival to shine, As a wit, if not first, in the very first line; Yet with talents like these, and an excellent heart, The man had his failings, a dupe to his art;…

    • William Cowper, from “The Task”

      from Book 1 For I have loved the rural walk through lanes Of grassy swarth close cropt by nibbling sheep, And skirted thick with intertexture firm Of thorny boughs: have loved the rural walk O’er hills, through valleys, and by rivers brink, E’er since a truant boy I pass’d my bounds T’enjoy a ramble on…

    • Thomas Holcroft, “Gaffer Gray”

      Ho! Why dost thou shiver and shake, Gaffer Gray? And why doth thy nose look so blue? “’Tis the weather that’s cold; ’Tis I’m grown very old, And my doublet is not very new, Well-a-day!’ Then line thy worn doublet with ale, Gaffer Gray; And warm thy old heart with a glass. “Nay but credit…

    • The Great Myths #2: Enkidu in the Underworld (from the archive)

      An episode from 12/30/20: In this second episode on Mesopotamian myth, we return to the story of Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh and Enkidu’s destructive adventures lead directly to the latter’s death, and here I read Enkidu’s deathbed speech, and the dream he has of the Underworld. The translations I read from are by ⁠Andrew George⁠ and N. K. Sandars. Other…

    • George Farewell, from “The Country Man”

      Over the meadow bounds the skittish colt, And dashes in swift course the bord ring wave, Or scours the hollow of the lofty mount, And plashes through the stony stream unshod. Fierce shines his comely front, his waving mane Wantons in wind, his ears prick quavering up. From his round jetty head his ample eye…

    • John O’Keeffe, “Air”

      AirA flaxen-headed cow-boy, as simple as may be, And next a merry plough-boy, I whistled o’er the lea;But now a saucy footman, I strut in worsted lace,And soon I’ll be a butler, and wag my jolly face;When steward I’m promoted, I’ll snip a tradesman’s bill, My master’s coffers empty, my pockets for to fill;When lolling…

    • 2 Anonymous Poems from the 18th Century

      The Soldier that has Seen Service. A Sketch from Nature (published 1788)From Calpe’s rock, with loss of leg, Reduced from port to port to beg, See the conquering hero comes:An ass’s panniers bear his all, Two sickly brats that fret and bawl, And suck, for want of food, their thumbs.The drooping mother follows near, Now…

    • William Blake, 3 excerpts from “Jerusalem” on Creativity & Vision

      “When this Verse was first dictated to me”When this Verse was first dictated to me I consider’d a Monotonous Cadence like that used by Milton & Shakspeare & all writers of English Blank Verse, derived from the modern bondage of Rhyming; to be a necessary and indispensible part of Verse. But I soon found that…

    • The Sound of Beethoven (from the archive)

      An episode from 1/1/24: Tonight, a cold has forced me to hand over the episode almost entirely to some of the greatest music ever written. Here are excerpts of my favorite pieces from Ludwig van Beethoven (1750-1827). It’s hard to think of music that is more passionate, introspective, uplifting, brooding, mournful, and joyous. The sources…

    • Robert Burns, 2 Songs

      John Anderson my Jo John Anderson my jo, John, When we were first acquent, Your locks were like the raven, Your bony brow was brent;But now your brow is beld, John, Your locks are like the snaw;But blessings on your frosty pow, John Anderson my jo.John Anderson my jo, John, We clamb the hill the…

    • William Wordsworth, Three Sonnets on How to Live

      “The world is too much with us”The world is too much with us; late and soon,Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:Little we see in nature that is ours;We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;The Winds that will be howling at all hoursAnd are…

    • Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Frost at Midnight”

      The Frost performs its secret ministry,Unhelped by any wind. The owlet’s cryCame loud – and hark, again! loud as before.The inmates of my cottage, all at rest,Have left me to that solitude, which suitsAbstruser musings: save that at my sideMy cradled infant slumbers peacefully.’Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbsAnd vexes meditation with its…

    • Walter Savage Landor, “Separation”

      There is a mountain and a wood between us,Where the lone shepherd and late bird have seen usMorning and noon and even-tide repass.Between us now the mountain and the woodSeem standing darker than last year they stood,And say we must not cross, alas! alas! Walter Savage Landor, 1775-1864 – “Separation” from Poems

    • Bruce Springsteen / Simon Schama / The Iliad (from the archive)

      An episode from 7/28/23: Tonight’s episode looks in on history, creativity, and mourning from three different angles: In the first part, we hear scattered remarks from Bruce Springsteen over the years, about his low-fi and haunting 1982 album, ⁠Nebraska⁠. It is remarkable how the album was made by Springsteen, alone in his bedroom, with a cheap…

    • John Clare, “An Invite to Eternity”

      Wilt thou go with me sweet maidSay maiden wilt thou go with meThrough the valley depths of shadeOf night and dark obscurityWhere the path hath lost its wayWhere the sun forgets the dayWhere there’s nor life nor light to seeSweet maiden wilt thou go with meWhere stones will turn to flooding streamsWhere plains will rise…

    • Now available: “Bone Antler Stone”

      Back in 2018, Bone Antler Stone was first released in Britain by The High Window Press. It has now been released in America by S4N Books. You can buy the book here. Scroll down for reviews, audio I’ve recorded from the book, and an interview with NPR. “Our prehistory now has its poet laureate.”– Barry…

    • John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

      Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness, Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,Sylvan historian, who canst thus express A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape Of deities or mortals, or of both, In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? What…

    • Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “’Tis better to have loved and lost”: 3 poems from “In Memoriam”

      7Dark house, by which once more I stand Here in the long unlovely street, Doors, where my heart was used to beatSo quickly, waiting for a hand,A hand that can be clasp’d no more – Behold me, for I cannot sleep, And like a guilty thing I creepAt earliest morning to the door.He is not…

    • Notes from the Grid: All Things Can Console (from the archive)

      An episode from 5/9/22: Tonight, I continue my five-part series called Notes from the Grid. (A print version of NFTG has since been published.) I suggest that we don’t need to be missionaries for the culture and politics and even religion we love, and nor should we assume that anybody else needs the very things that we…

    • Emily Brontë, “The night is darkening round me”

      The night is darkening round meThe wild winds coldly blowBut a tyrant spell has bound meAnd I cannot, cannot goThe giant trees are bendingTheir bare boughs weighed with snowThe storm is fast descendingAnd yet I cannot goClouds beyond clouds above meWastes beyond wastes belowBut nothing drear can move meI will not, cannot go Emily Brontë,…

    • Walt Whitman, “Song of the Open Road”

      Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road!Healthy, free, the world before me!The long brown path before me, leading wherever I choose!Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I am good-fortune,Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,Strong and content, I travel the open road.The earth – that is sufficient,I do not want the…

    • Matthew Arnold, “Lines Written in Kensington Gardens”

      In this lone, open glade I lie,Screen’d by deep boughs on either hand;And at its end, to stay the eye,Those black-crown’d, red-boled pine-trees stand!Birds here make song, each bird has his,Across the girdling city’s hum.How green under the boughs it is!How thick the tremulous sheep-cries come!Sometimes a child will cross the gladeTo take his nurse…

    • Emily Dickinson, “The Props assist the House”

      The Props assist the HouseUntil the House is builtAnd then the Props withdrawAnd adequate, erect,The House support itselfAnd cease to recollectThe Augur and the Carpenter –Just such a retrospectHath the perfected Life –A Past of Plank and NailAnd slowness – then the scaffolds dropAffirming it a Soul – Emily Dickinson, 1830-1886 – “The Props assist…

    • Advice from Walt Whitman & W. B. Yeats (from the archive)

      An episode from 10/20/21: Tonight, we hear anecdotes from the lives of two very different poets, Walt Whitman and W. B. Yeats. The remarks from Whitman come from the journals he kept while working out the poems that went into the first edition of Leaves of Grass, while the comments from Yeats span the first…

    • Christina Rossetti, “A Dirge”

      Why were you born when the snow was falling?You should have come to the cuckoo’s calling,Or when grapes are green in the cluster,Or, at least, when lithe swallows muster For their far off flying From summer dying.Why did you die when the lambs were cropping?You should have died at the apples’ dropping,When the grasshopper comes…

    • Thomas Hardy, “The Darkling Thrush”

      I leant upon a coppice gate When Frost was spectre-grey,And Winter’s dregs made desolate The weakening eye of day.The tangled bine-stems scored the sky Like strings of broken lyres,And all mankind that haunted nigh Had sought their household fires.The land’s sharp features seemed to be The Century’s corpse outleant,His crypt the cloudy canopy, The wind…

    • Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Binsey Poplars”

      Felled 1879My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,All felled, felled, are all felled; Of a fresh and following folded rank Not spared, not one That dandled a sandalled Shadow that swam or sankOn meadow & river & wind-wandering weed-winding bank. O if we but knew what we do…

    • A. E. Housman, “I hoed and trenched and weeded”

      I hoed and trenched and weeded, And took the flowers to fair: I brought them home unheeded; The hue was not the wear. So up and down I sow them For lads like me to find, When I shall lie below them, A dead man out of mind. Some seed the birds devour, And some…

    • W. B. Yeats, “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”

      II sought a theme and sought for it in vain,I sought it daily for six weeks or so.Maybe at last being but a broken manI must be satisfied with my heart, althoughWinter and summer till old age beganMy circus animals were all on show,Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot,Lion and woman and the Lord knows…

    • The Great Myths #1: Gilgamesh Begins (from the archive)

      An episode from 12/19/20: Tonight, I begin perhaps the most important series of episodes on this podcast, a deep dive into my favorite stories from mythology and religion. All episodes of The Great Myths are here. I begin with the Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh. Reading from the translation by Andrew George (and an earlier one, by N. K.…

    • A Farewell to the Podcast with Theodore Roethke’s “The Rose”

      An episode from 10/8/24: Tonight, four years to the day after starting this podcast, I end it with a reading of Theodore Roethke’s (1908-1963) long poem, “The Rose.” I also reread the poem I shared in the very first episode, Louise Glück’s (1943-2023) “Messengers.” Many thanks to my listeners over the past four years. You can…

    • Edgar Lee Masters, “Editor Whedon”

      To be able to see every side of every question;To be on every side, to be everything, to be nothing long;To pervert truth, to ride it for a purpose,To use great feelings and passions of the human familyFor base designs, for cunning ends,To wear a mask like the Greek actors –Your eight-page paper – behind…

    • Walter de la Mare, “The Scarecrow”

      All winter through I bow my head Beneath the driving rain; The North Wind powders me with snow And blows me black again; At midnight in a maze of stars I flame with glittering rime, And stand, above the stubble, stiff As mail at morning-prime. But when that child, called Spring, and all His host…

    • Robert Frost, “The Pasture”

      I’m going out to clean the pasture spring;I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):I sha’n’t be gone long. – You come too.I’m going out to fetch the little calfThat’s standing by the mother. It’s so young,It totters when she licks it with her tongue.I sha’n’t be…

    • Carl Sandburg, “The Harbor”

      Passing through huddled and ugly walls,By doorways where women haggardLooked from their hunger-deep eyes,Haunted with shadows of hunger-hands,Out from the huddled and ugly walls,I came sudden, at the city’s edge,On a blue burst of lake,Long lake waves breaking under the sunOn a spray-flung curve of shore;And a fluttering storm of gulls,Masses of great gray wingsAnd…

    • Edward Thomas, “Rain”

      Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me Remembering again that I shall die And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks For washing me cleaner than I have been Since I was born into this solitude. Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:…

    • 7 Poems by H. D. (new episode)

      An episode from 9/23/24: Tonight, I read seven poems by the American poet, H. D. (Hilda Doolittle, 1886-1961). Over the course of fifty years her work – which includes fiction, memoir and translation – provides an incredible example of how a writer can handle mythology, mysticism, sexuality and autobiography. The poems can be found in Collected…

    • Wallace Stevens, “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour”

      Light the first light of evening, as in a roomIn which we rest and, for small reason, thinkThe world imagined is the ultimate good.This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous. It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:Within a single thing, a single shawlWrapped tightly round us, since…

    • William Carlos Williams, “Waiting”

      When I am alone I am happy.The air is cool. The sky isflecked and splashed and woundwith color. The crimson phalloiof the sassafras leaveshang crowded before mein shoals on the heavy branches.When I reach my doorstepI am greeted bythe happy shrieks of my childrenand my heart sinks.I am crushed.Are not my children as dear to…

    • Siegfried Sassoon, “Everyone Sang”

      Everyone suddenly burst out singing;And I was filled with such delightAs prisoned birds must find in freedom,Winging wildly across the whiteOrchards and dark-green fields; on – on – and out of sight.Everyone’s voice was suddenly lifted;And beauty came like the setting sun:My heart was shaken with tears; and horrorDrifted away … O, but EveryoneWas a…

    • H. D., “The God”

      II asked of your face:is it dark,set beneath heavy locks,circled with stiff ivy-fruit,clear,cut with great hammer-stroke,brow, nose and mouth,mysterious and far distantfrom my sense.I asked:can he from his portals of ebonycarved with grapes,turn toward the earth?I even spoke this blasphemyin my thoughts:the earth is evil,given over to evil,we are lost.IIAnd in a momentyou have altered…

    • Robinson Jeffers, “New Mexican Mountain”

      I watch the Indians dancing to help the young corn at Taos pueblo. The old men squat in a ringAnd make the song, the young women with fat bare arms, and a few shame-faced young men, shuffle the dance.The lean-muscled young men are naked to the narrow loins, their breasts and backs daubed with white…

    • T. S. Eliot, “Preludes”

      IThe winter evening settles downWith smell of steaks in passageways.Six o’clock.The burnt-out ends of smoky days.And now a gusty shower wrapsThe grimy scrapsOf withered leaves about your feetAnd newspapers from vacant lots;The showers beatOn broken blinds and chimney-pots,And at the corner of the streetA lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.And then the lighting of the lamps.IIThe…

    • Wilfred Owen, 2 War Poems

      Dulce et Decorum EstBent double, like old beggars under sacks,Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,And towards our distant rest began to trudge.Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hootsOf gas-shells…

    • 6 Poems by R. S. Thomas (new episode)

      An episode from 9/11/24: Tonight, I read six poems by the Welsh poet, R. S. Thomas (1913-2000). A priest in the Anglican church from 1936 until 1978, Thomas wrote some of the most moving poems we have about religious belief, rural life, and the simple feeling some of us have of belonging nowhere. It is said…

    • Hart Crane, “My Grandmother’s Love Letters”

      There are no stars tonightBut those of memory.Yet how much room for memory there isIn the loose girdle of soft rain.There is even room enoughFor the letters of my mother’s mother,Elizabeth,That have been pressed so longInto a corner of the roofThat they are brown and soft,And liable to melt as snow.Over the greatness of such…

    • Yvor Winters, “Time and the Garden”

      The spring has darkened with activity.The future gathers in vine, bush, and tree:Persimmon, walnut, loquat, fig, and grape,Degrees and kinds of color, taste, and shape.These will advance in their due series, spaceThe season like a tranquil dwelling-place.And yet excitement swells me, vein by vein:I long to crowd the little garden, gainIts sweetness in my hand…

    • Robert Francis, “Earthworm”

      My spading fork turning the earth turnsThis fellow out – without touching him this time.Robbed of all resistance to his progressHe squirms awhile in the too-easy air Before an ancient and implicit purposeStarts him traveling in one directionReaching out, contracting, reaching out,Contracting – a clean and glistening earth-pink.He has turned more earth than I have…

    • Kenneth Rexroth, “Hapax”

      The Same Poem Over and OverHoly Week. Once more the full moonBlooms in deep heavenLike a crystal flower of ice.The wide winter constellationsSet in fog brimming overThe seaward hills. Out beyond them,In the endless dark, uncountedMinute clots of light go by,Billions of light years away,Billions of universes,Full of stars and their planetsWith creatures on them…

    • Vernon Watkins, 2 Poems for Wine & Festival

      VineDeep-rooted vine, delay your fruit Beyond youth’s rashness. I have seen Rich promise wither to the root Before its time had been.Drain all the darkness of the soil And stand there shrivelled, crisp and dry, Too lifeless in your parchment coilTo open one green eye.Some watch the March winds animateThose early bulbs in Winter’s bed.Envy…

    • Louis MacNeice, “Soap suds”

      This brand of soap has the same smell as once in the bigHouse he visited when he was eight: the walls of the bathroom openTo reveal a lawn where a great yellow ball rolls back through a hoopTo rest at the head of a mallet held in the hands of a child.And these were the…

    • George Oppen, “Pedestrian”

      What generations could have dreamedThis grandchild of the shopping streets, her eyesIn the buyer’s light, the store lightsBrighter than the lighthouses, brighter than moonriseFrom the salt harbor so richSo bright her cityIn a soil of pavement, a mesh of wires where she walksIn this new winter among enormous buildings. George Oppen, 1908-1984 – “Pedestrian” from New…

    • Theodore Roethke, “Root Cellar”

      Nothing would sleep in that cellar, dank as a ditch,Bulbs broke out of boxes hunting for chinks in the dark, Shoots dangled and drooped,Lolling obscenely from mildewed crates,Hung down long yellow evil necks, like tropical snakes.And what a congress of stinks! – Roots ripe as old bait,Pulpy stems, rank, silo-rich,Leaf-mold, manure, lime, piled against slippery…

    • Elizabeth Bishop, “A Cold Spring”

      For Jane Dewey, MarylandNothing is so beautiful as spring. – HopkinsA cold spring:the violet was flawed on the lawn.For two weeks or more the trees hesitated;the little leaves waited,carefully indicating their characteristics.Finally a grave green dustsettled over your big and aimless hills.One day, in a chill white blast of sunshine,on the side of one a…

    • R. S. Thomas, “The Moor”

      It was like a church to me.I entered it on soft foot,Breath held like a cap in the hand.It was quiet.What God was there made himself felt,Not listened to, in clean colours That brought a moistening of the eye, In movement of the wind over grass.There were no prayers said. But stillness Of the heart’s…

    • 4 Poems by Kenneth Rexroth (new episode)

      An episode from 8/30/24: Tonight, I read four poems by the American poet Kenneth Rexroth (1905-1982). A few years ago, when I began digging through anthologies of American poetry, Rexroth stood out immediately among the usual names from the twentieth century. I can’t think of many American poets who have written so beautifully about nature, about…

    • Dylan Thomas, “In my craft or sullen art”

      In my craft or sullen artExercised in the still nightWhen only the moon ragesAnd the lovers lie abedWith all their griefs in their arms,I labour by singing lightNot for ambition or breadOr the strut and trade of charmsOn the ivory stagesBut for the common wagesOf their most secret heart.Not for the proud man apartFrom the…

    • Robert Lowell, “History”

      History has to live with what was here,clutching and close to fumbling all we had –it is so dull and gruesome how we die,unlike writing, life never finishes.Abel was finished; death is not remote,a flash-in-the-pan electrifies the skeptic,his cows crowding like skulls against high-voltage wire,his baby crying all night like a new machine.As in our…

    • Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “A Coney Island of the Mind” #20

      The pennycandystore beyond the Elis where I first fell in love with unrealityJellybeans glowed in the semi-gloomof that september afternoonA cat upon the counter moved among the licorice sticks and tootsie rolls and Oh Boy GumOutside the leaves were falling as they diedA wind had blown away the sunA girl ran inHer hair was rainyHer…

    • Philip Larkin, “This Be the Verse”

      They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you.But they were fucked up in their turn By fools in old-style hats and coats, Who half the time were soppy-stern And half at one…

    • Denise Levertov, “O Taste and See”

      The world isnot with us enoughO taste and seethe subway Bible poster said,meaning The Lord, meaningif anything all that livesto the imagination’s tongue,grief, mercy, language,tangerine, weather, tobreathe them, bite,savor, chew, swallow, transforminto our flesh ourdeaths, crossing the street, plum, quince,living in the orchard and beinghungry, and pluckingthe fruit. Denise Levertov, 1923-1997 – “A Map of…

    • Robert Lowell: 10 Essential Poems

      An episode from 11/4/22: Tonight, I read ten essential poems from the American poet, Robert Lowell (1917-1977). Lowell was perhaps the last American poet we could possibly call “famous” during his lifetime. The combination of his early success and subsequent struggles with mental illness meant that the public witnessed all of it, from his slow…

    • Gerald Stern, “The Dancing”

      In all these rotten shops, in all this broken furnitureand wrinkled ties and baseball trophies and coffee potsI have never seen a postwar Philcowith the automatic eyenor heard Ravel’s “Bolero” the way I didin 1945 in that tiny living roomon Beechwood Boulevard, nor danced as I didthen, my knives all flashing, my hair all streaming,my…

    • Allen Ginsberg, “Footnote to Howl”

      Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand and asshole holy!Everything is holy! everybody’s holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman’s an angel!The bum’s as…

    • James Merrill, from “The Book of Ephraim”

      Admittedly I err by undertakingThis in its present form. The baldest proseReportage was called for, that would reachThe widest public in the shortest time.Time, it had transpired, was of the essence.Time, the very attar of the Rose,Was running out. We, though, were ancient foes,I and the deadline. Also my subject matterGave me pause – so…

    • A. R. Ammons, “The City Limits”

      When you consider the radiance, that it does not withholditself but pours its abundance without selection into everynook and cranny not overhung or hidden; when you considerthat birds’ bones make no awful noise against the light butlie low in the light as in a high testimony; when you considerthe radiance, that it will look into…

    • Galway Kinnell, “The Porcupine”

      1Fattedon herbs, swollen on crabapples, puffed up on bast and phloem, ballooned on willow flowers, poplar catkins, first leafs of aspen and larch, the porcupinedrags and bounces his last meal through ice, mud, roses and goldenrod, into the stubbly high fields.2In characterhe resembles us in seven ways:he puts his mark on outhouses, he alchemizes by…

    • The Midsummer Fire Festivals of Old Europe

      An episode from 6/12/23: Tonight, I read from James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough, and the accounts he collected on the midsummer fire festivals in premodern Europe. I also discuss the relevance of these stories to a long poem-in-progress of mine, The Great Year, as well as my own adventures in acquiring all thirteen volumes…

    • W. S. Merwin, “Air”

      Naturally it is night.Under the overturned lute with itsOne string I am going my wayWhich has a strange sound.This way the dust, that way the dust.I listen to both sidesBut I keep right on.I remember the leaves sitting in judgmentAnd then winter.I remember the rain with its bundle of roads.The rain taking all its roads.Nowhere.Young…

    • James Wright, “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio”

      In the Shreve High football stadium,I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,Dreaming of heroes.All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home,Their women cluck like starved pullets,Dying for love.Therefore,Their sons grow suicidally beautifulAt the beginning of…

    • Robert Pinsky, “The Figured Wheel”

      The figured wheel rolls through shopping malls and prisons,Over farms, small and immense, and the rotten little downtowns.Covered with symbols, it mills everything alive and grindsThe remains of the dead in the cemeteries, in unmarked graves and oceans.Sluiced by salt water and fresh, by pure and contaminated rivers,By snow and sand, it separates and recombines…

    • Advice from Robert Pinsky (new episode)

      An episode from 8/14/24: Tonight, I read excerpts from the poet Robert Pinsky’s 1995 interview with The Paris Review. It is fascinating to see how much of what he says seems timeless and wise (everything on creativity, writing habits, high and low speech, etc.), and those things that seem stuck in the amber of 1995 (the…

    • Philip Levine, from “Burned”

      I have to go back into the forge room at Chevy where Lonnie still calls out his commands to Sweet Pea and Packy and stare into the fire until my eyes are also fireand tear away some piece of my face because we’re all burning in the blood and it’s too late. I have to…

    • Anne Sexton, “Her Kind”

      I have gone out, a possessed witch, haunting the black air, braver at night; dreaming evil, I have done my hitch over the plain houses, light by light: lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind. A woman like that is not a woman, quite. I have been her kind.I have found the warm caves in the…

    • Adrienne Rich, “Upper Broadway”

      The leafbud struggles forthtoward the light of the airshaft this is faiththis pale extension of a daywhen looking up you know something is changingwinter has turned though the wind is colderThree streets away a roof collapses onto peoplewho thought they still had time Time out of mindI have written so many wordswanting to live inside…

    • Gary Snyder, “August on Sourdough, A Visit from Dick Brewer”

      You hitched a thousand miles north from San FranciscoHiked up the mountainside a mile in the airThe little cabin – one room – walled in glassMeadows and snowfields, hundreds of peaks.We lay in our sleeping bags talking half the night;Wind in the guy-cables summer mountain rain.Next morning I went with you as far as the…

    • Derek Walcott, “Sea Grapes”

      That sail which leans on light,tired of islands,a schooner beating up the Caribbeanfor home, could be Odysseus,home-bound on the Aegean;that father and husband’slonging, under gnarled sour grapes, islike the adulterer hearing Nausicaa’s namein every gull’s outcry.This brings nobody peace. The ancient warbetween obsession and responsibilitywill never finish and has been the samefor the sea-wanderer or…

    • Ted Hughes, “October Salmon”

      He’s lying in poor water, a yard or so depth of poor safety,Maybe only two feet under the no-protection of an outleaning small oak,Half under a tangle of brambles.After his two thousand miles, he rests,Breathing in that lap of easy currentIn his graveyard pool.About six pounds weight,Four years old at most, and hardly a winter…

    • Patti Smith / Mazzy Star / Philip Glass

      An episode from 11/13/23: Tonight, I talk about our attachment to music as teenagers and adults, and the lessons that loving music—and finding meaning in musicians’ life stories—can teach us. First, I read two passages from Patti Smith’s memoir, Just Kids. Those parts on her early life with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, before either of them…

    • Mary Oliver, “Snow Moon – Black Bear Gives Birth”

      It was not quite spring, it was the gray flux before. Out of the black wave of sleep she turned, enormous beast, and welcomed the little ones, blind pink islands no bigger than shoes. She washed them; she nibbled them with teeth like white tusks; she curled down beside them like a horizon. They snuggled.…

    • Frances Horovitz, “Rain – Birdoswald”

      I stand under a leafless treemore still, in this mouse-pattering thrum of rain,than cattle shifting in the field. It is more dark than light.A Chinese painter’s brush of deepening grey moves in a subtle tide. The beasts are darker islands now.Wet-stained and silvered by the rain they suffer night,marooned as still as stone or tree.…

    • Seamus Heaney: 7 Poems from “North” (new episode)

      An episode from 8/1/24: Tonight, I read seven poems from Seamus Heaney’s 1974 collection, North. Few poets from the last century took on the reality of violence in the ancient and modern world the way Heaney does in his poems about Iron Age bog bodies, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and ruminations through mythology and Viking…

    • Seamus Heaney, 2 Bog Poems

      The Tollund ManISome day I will go to AarhusTo see his peat-brown head,The mild pods of his eye-lids,His pointed skin cap.In the flat country near byWhere they dug him out,His last gruel of winter seedsCaked in his stomach,Naked except forThe cap, noose and girdle,I will stand a long time.Bridegroom to the goddess,She tightened her torc…

    • Robert Haas, “Meditation at Lagunitas”

      All the new thinking is about loss.In this it resembles all the old thinking.The idea, for example, that each particular erasesthe luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunkof that black birch is, by his presence,some tragic falling off from a first worldof undivided light. Or the other…

    • Advice from Toni Morrison, T. S. Eliot, John Berryman // Whitman’s Earliest Critics

      An episode from 4/6/22: Another two-part episode. In the first, we hear from Toni Morrison about the use of anger in writing novels; from the poet Richard Wilbur on the suicide of fellow-poet John Berryman, and the perils of having few interests outside of poetry. Other remarks from Berryman himself, and T. S. Eliot, touch…

    • Sharon Olds, “The Month of June: 13½”

      As our daughter approaches graduation and puberty at the same time, at herown, calm, deliberate, serious rate,she begins to kick up her heels, jazz out her hands, thrust out her hipbones, chantI’m great! I’m great! She feels 8th grade coming open around her, a chrysalis cracking and letting her out, it falls behind her and…

    • Louise Glück, “Summer Night”

      Orderly, and out of long habit, my heart continues to beat.I hear it, nights when I wake, over the mild sound of the air conditioner.As I used to hear it over the beloved’s heart, orvariety of hearts, owing to there having been several.And as it beats, it continues to drum up ridiculous emotion.So many passionate…

    • Cities Under Siege: Occupied Paris, Gauls in Rome, Blake’s London

      An episode from 8/4/23: Tonight, we hear from cities under siege: The music I play in the introduction, from Ludwig Goranson’s score to the movie Oppenheimer, can be found here. You can support Human Voices Wake Us here, or by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The…

    • Eavan Boland, “The Pomegranate”

      The only legend I have ever loved isthe story of a daughter lost in hell.And found and rescued there.Love and blackmail are the gist of it.Ceres and Persephone the names.And the best thing about the legend isI can enter it anywhere. And have.As a child in exile ina city of fogs and strange consonants,I read…

    • Thomas James, “Lambs”

      Under branches of white lilac They crop the wet grass just before dawn. They move smokily through the half-light, smudge pots Pulsing against a thick morning frost. My watch glows like a small, improbable moon. Six o’clock. I have been driving into the dark too long. I pull to the side of the road. I…

    • Duncan Forbes, “Recension Day”

      Unburn the boat, rebuild the bridge,Reconsecrate the sacrilege,Unspill the milk, decry the tears,Turn back the clock, relive the years,Replace the smoke inside the fire,Unite fulfilment with desire,Undo the done, gainsay the said,Revitalize the buried dead,Revoke the penalty and clause,Reconstitute unwritten laws,Repair the heart, untie the tongue,Change faithless old to hopeful young,Inure the body to diseaseAnd…

    • The Great Myths #14: The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel (Celtic)

      An episode from 10/30/21: In this seventh episode on Celtic mythology, I review one of the greatest surviving stories in the tradition, Togail Bruidne Dá Derga, or The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel. Since it is also fairly long, I only share two small sections from the story itself: a piece from the beginning, and…

    • Jane Kenyon, “Let Evening Come”

      Let the light of late afternoonshine through chinks in the barn, moving up the bales as the sun moves down.Let the cricket take up chafing as a woman takes up her needles and her yarn. Let evening come.Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned in long grass. Let the stars appearand the moon disclose her…

    • Brigit Pegeen Kelly, “The Leaving”

      My father said I could not do it,but all night I picked the peaches.The orchard was still, the canals ran steadily.I was a girl then, my chest its own walled garden.How many ladders to gather an orchard?I had only one and a long patience with lit handsand the looking of the stars which moved right…

    • Little Biographies (new episode)

      An episode from 7/18/24: Tonight, I read the small biographies of nearly two dozen poets, the kind of colorful summaries usually found in poetry anthologies. In many cases, reading a paragraph or two about twenty people is enough to get the sense of a life, and of just how varied the lives of poets (or…

    • Laurie Sheck, “Headlights”

      Night, and I watched from the sideof the river the cars inching forward, a line of white headlights like the white-tipped canes the blind put out before each step, tapping downonto the otherness, the world. The insides of the cars were dark, the windows dark.I couldn’t see how flesh is taken up into the distances,…

    • Kathleen Jamie, “The Way We Live”

      Pass the tambourine, let me bash out praisesto the Lord God of movement, to Absolutenon-friction, flight, and the scarey side:death by avalanche, birth by failed contraception.Of chicken tandoori and reggae, loud, from tenements,commitment, driving fast and unswervingfriendship. Of tee-shirts on pulleys, giros and Bombay,barmen, dreaming waitresses with many fake-goldbangles. Of airports, impulse, and waking to…

    • Aidan Carl Matthews, “Woodniche”

      The dragonflies were here before us, friend:Cupboard of branch and bramble, woodnicheWhere the sun tumbles, foxgloves are gorgeous.Children tore their knees among the thorns,Fleshed their pullovers with raspberries.Orange peel made ripples in the brown water,Pebbles explored beyond our peering. IChewed dandelions and the sun brothered me.Huge as policemen, sombre as soutanes,The kind trees whispered in…

    • Alice Oswald, “The mud-spattered recollections of a woman who lived her life backwards”

      I’ll tell you a tale: one morning one morning I lay in my uncomfortable six-foot small grave,I lay sulking about a somewhat too short-litlife both fruitful and dutiful. It was death it was death like an inbreath fully inhaled in the grief of the world when at last there began to emerge a way out,…

    • Two Anonymous Poems from ca. 1325

      Thanks to everyone who has been reading and commenting on the Daily Poems. This first round of them began back in December, with a poem by Alice Oswald. For the past seven months we’ve gone backwards nearly seven hundred years, and have finally landed here, around 1325, at some of the earliest poetry in English.…

    • William Carlos Williams: 11 Essential Poems

      An episode from 12/15/22: Tonight, I read eleven essential poems from the American poet William Carlos Williams (1883-1963). In the same generation as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, Williams is perhaps best known for never becoming an expatriate, and instead living most of his life as a family doctor in Rutherford, New Jersey. His…

    • William Langland, from “The Vision of Piers Plowman”

      1 In a somur sesoun whan softe was the sonne2 I shope me into shroudes as I a shep were –3 In abite as an heremite unholy of werkes4 Wente forth in the world wondres to here,5 And say many sellies and selkouthe thynges.6 Ac on a May mornyng on Malverne hulles7 Me biful for…

    • Geoffrey Chaucer, from “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue”

      1 My fourthe housbonde was a revelour – 2 This is to seyn, he hadde a paramour – 3 And I was yong and ful of ragerye,4 Stibourn and strong, and joly as a pye.5 How koude I daunce to an harpe smale,6 And synge, ywis, as any nyghtyngale,7 Whan I had dronke a draughte…

    • Two Anonymous Poems from ca. 1500

      “Farewell, this world! I take my leve for evere” (published 1515)Farewell, this world! I take my leve for evere; I am arested to apere at Goddes face.O myghtyfull God, thou knowest that I had levere Than all this world to have oone houre space To make asythe for all my grete trespace.My hert, alas, is…

    • Louise Glück: Poems from “The Wild Iris” & “Ararat”

      An episode from 11/13/21: Tonight, I read eight poems from Louise Glück’s 1992 collection, The Wild Iris. Following these are an episode from March, 2021, of six poems from her 1990 book, Ararat. A good barometer for determining any poet’s best work is “the poems nobody else could have written,” and indeed there is nothing…

    • Alexander Barclay, from “Certayne Ecloges”

      Amintas first speaketh.The winter snowes, all covered is the grounde,The north-wind blowes sharpe and with ferefull sound,The longe ise sicles at the ewes hang,The streame is frosen, the night is cold and long,Where botes rowed nowe cartes haue passage,From yoke the oxen be losed and bondage,The ploweman resteth avoyde of businesse,Save when he tendeth his…

    • Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, “The soote season, that bud and blome furth bringes”

      The soote season, that bud and blome furth bringes,With grene hath clad the hill and eke the vale:The nightingale with fethers new she singes:The turtle to her make hath tolde her tale:Somer is come, for every spray nowe springes, The hart hath hong his olde hed on the pale:The buck in brake his winter cote…

    • Nostalgia (new episode)

      An episode from 7/5/24: Tonight, I devote an hour to wondering how we talk about childhood and memory, how we live with memory and meaning, how we perceive time and recollect the most vivid events of our lives. For me, music is inseparable from all of this, and I play a few songs in this…

    • Edward Dyer, “A Silent Love”

      The lowest trees have tops, the ant her gall,The fly her spleen, the little spark his heat;And slender hairs cast shadows, though but small,And bees have stings, although they be not great; Seas have their source, and so have shallow springs; And love is love, in beggars and in kings.Where waters smoothest run, there deepest…

    • George Turberville, “To his Love that sent him a Ring wherein was gravde, Let Reason rule”

      Shall Reason rule where Reason hath no right?Nor ever had? shall Cupid loose his landes?His claim? his crown? his kingdome? name of mightAnd yeeld himselfe to be in Reasons bandes?No, (Friend) thy Ring doth wil me thus in vaine,Reason and Love have ever yet beene twaine. They are by kinde of such contrarie mouldAs one…

    • Edmund Spenser, “The Garden of Adonis”

      In that same Gardin all the goodly flowres, Wherewith dame Nature doth her beautifie, And decks the girlonds of her paramoures, Are fetcht: there is the first seminarie Of all things, that are borne to live and die, According to their kindes. Long worke it were, Here to account the endlesse progenie Of all the…

    • Philip Sidney, “Loving in truth, and faine in verse my love to show”

      Loving in truth, and faine in verse my love to show,That she deare she might take some pleasure of my paine:Pleasure might cause her reade, reading might make her know,Knowledge might pitie winne, and pitie grace obtaine, I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe,Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertaine:Oft turning…

    • Chidiock Tichborne, “My prime of youth is but a froste of cares”

      My prime of youth is but a froste of cares:My feaste of joy, is but a dishe of payne:My cropp of corne, is but a field of tares:And all my good is but vaine hope of gaine:The daye is gone, and yet I sawe no sonn:And nowe I live, and nowe my life is donnThe…

    • William Shakespeare, “All the world’s a stage”

      Jacques: All the world’s a stage,And all the men and women merely players.They have their exits and their entrances,And one man in his time plays many parts,His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.Then the whining schoolboy with his satchelAnd shining morning face, creeping like snailUnwillingly to school.…

    • Raising a Musical Prodigy / God’s Response to Job

      An episode from 9/1/23: In the first part of tonight’s episode, I read from Andrew Solomon’s Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, & the Search for Identity, where Solomon talks about musical prodigies and the difficulties they face as children and adults. In the second part, I read one of the most powerful pieces of poetry…

    • Christopher Marlowe, “The Passionate Sheepheard to his Love”

      Come live with mee, and be my love,And we will all the pleasures prove,That Vallies, groves, hills and fieldes,Woods, or steepie mountaine yeeldes.And wee will sit upon the Rocks,Seeing the Sheepheards feede theyr flocks,By shallow Rivers, to whose falls,Melodious byrds sing Madrigalls.And I will make thee beds of Roses,And a thousand fragrant poesies,A cap of…

    • Thomas Campion, “Never weather-beaten Saile”

      Never weather-beaten Saile more willing bent to shore,Never tyred Pilgrims limbs affected slumber more,Then my weary spright now longs to flye out of my troubled brest. O come quickly, sweetest Lord, and take my soule to rest.Ever-blooming are the joyes of Heav’ns high paradice,Cold age deafes not there our eares, nor vapour dims our eyes;Glory…

    • Ben Jonson, “On My First Sonne”

      Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy; My sinne was too much hope of thee, lov’d boy,Seven yeeres tho’wert lent to me, and I thee pay, Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.O, could I loose all father, now. For why Will man lament the state he should envie?To have so soone…

    • Anthology: Poems by Coleridge, Williams, Bronte, Pope & Fisher

      An episode from 1/18/22: Our anthology series presents a handful of poems from the past five centuries. How much or how little has our language changed since Roy Fisher remembered the London Blitz, Coleridge drew the greatest lesson he ever did from nature, and Emily Brontë experienced a haunting evening? A reading of five poems:…

    • John Donne, “Elegy: To his Mistress Going to Bed”

      Come, Madam, come, all rest my powers defy,Until I labour, I in labour lie.The foe oft-times having the foe in sight,Is tir’d with standing though he never fight.Off with that girdle, like heaven’s Zone glistering,But a far fairer world encompassing.Unpin that spangled breastplate which you wear,That th’eyes of busy fools may be stopped there.Unlace yourself,…

    • Katharine, Lady Dyer, “My dearest dust could not thy hasty day”

      My dearest dust could not thy hasty dayAfford thy drowzy patience leave to stayOne hower longer; so that we might either Sate up, or gone to bedd together?But since thy finisht labor hath possest Thy weary limbs with early rest,Enjoy it sweetly; and thy widdowe brideShall soone repose her by thy slumbring side;Whose business, now…

    • American Shaman

      An episode from 7/7/23: Tonight, I talk about writing my long poem, To the House of the Sun, published in 2015. The poem follows an Irish immigrant making his way through the American South, North and West, during the Civil War. The book is part travelogue, battle epic, and spiritual biography, and after describing how the…

    • Henry King, “A Contemplation upon Flowers”

      Brave flowers – that I could gallant it like you, And be as little vain!You come abroad, and make a harmless show, And to your beds of earth again.You are not proud: you know your birth:For your embroider’d garments are from earth.You do obey your months and times, but I Would have it ever Spring:My…

    • George Herbert, “The Pearl”

      Matthew 13I know the ways of learning; both the headAnd pipes that feed the press, and make it run;What reason hath from nature borrowèd,Or of itself, like a good huswife, spunIn laws and policy; what the stars conspire,What willing nature speaks, what forc’d by fire;Both th’old discoveries and the new-found seas,The stock and surplus, cause…

    • Walt Whitman’s Life #7: His Notebooks & the Publication of “Leaves of Grass” (new episode)

      An episode from 6/18/24: This is the seventh in a series of readings from biographies of Walt Whitman. I continue with Paul Zweig’s Walt Whitman: The Making of the Poet, which focuses on the years preceding the publication of Leaves of Grass. Previous readings from Whitman biographies are here. Tonight, Zweig discusses the nature of Whitman’s…

    • William Cartwright, “No Platonique Love”

      Tell me no more of minds embracing minds, And hearts exchang’d for hearts;That Spirits Spirits meet, as Winds do Winds, And mix their subt’lest parts;That two unbodi’d Essences may kiss,And then like Angels, twist and feel one Bliss.I was that silly thing that once was wrought To practice this thin Love;I climb’d from Sex to…

    • Ralph Knevet, “The Vote”

      The Helmett now an hive for Bees becomes,And hilts of swords may serve for Spiders’ loomes; Sharp pikes may make Teeth for a rake;And the keene blade, th’arch enemy of life,Shall bee digraded to a pruneing knife. The rusticke spade Which first was madeFor honest agriculture, shall retakeIts primitive imployment, and forsake The rampire’s steep…

    • 2 Anonymous Poems from 1600

      “The lowest trees have tops, the Ant her gall”The lowest trees have tops, the Ant her gall,the flie her spleene, the little sparke his heate,and slender haires cast shadowes though but small,and Bees have stings although they be not great.Seas have their source, and so have shallowe springs,and love is love in beggers and in…

    • Pythagoras: The Life & Times

      Tonight, I’m thrilled to read a poem that I began working on three years ago on the life, teachings, and mysticism of the Greek philosopher, Pythagoras (c. 570- c.495 BCE). I am also thrilled that the poem is being simultaneously published at The Basilisk Tree. Many thanks to its editor, Bryan Helton, for coordinating all of…

    • Thomas Randolph, “Upon His Picture”

      When age hath made me what I am not now,And every wrinkle tells me where the plowOf time hath furrowed; when an ice shall flowThrough every vein, and all my head wear snow;When death displays his coldness in my cheek,And I myself in my own picture seek,Not finding what I am, but what I was,In…

    • John Milton, from “Paradise Lost”

      Of Mans First Disobedience, and the FruitOf that Forbidd’n Tree, whose mortal tastBrought Death into the World, and all our woe,With loss of Eden, till one greater ManRestore us, and regain the blissful Seat,Sing Heav’nly Muse, that on the secret topOf Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspireThat Shepherd, who first taught the chosen Seed,In the…

    • Stephen King’s Great Novel of Parenthood & Grief

      An episode from 9/7/22: Tonight, I spend an hour talking about Stephen King’s 1983 novel, ⁠Pet Sematary⁠. The anxieties attached to being a parent have rarely book put this memorably, cloaked as it is in the kind foreordained doom we expect from Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Does the book also succeed so well because King’s usual strengths—gore…

    • Richard Crashaw, from “The Flaming Heart. Upon the Book and Picture of the Seraphicall Saint Teresa”

      O sweet incendiary! shew here thy art,Upon this carcasse of a hard, cold, hart,Let all thy scatter’d shafts of light, that playAmong the leaves of thy larg Books of day,Combin’d against this BREST at once break inAnd take away from me my self and sin,This gratious Robbery shall thy bounty be;And my best fortunes such…

    • Anne Bradstreet, “The Author to Her Book”

      Thou ill-form’d offspring of my feeble brain,Who after birth didst by my side remain,Till snatched from thence by friends, less wise than true,Who thee abroad, expos’d to publick view,Made thee in raggs, halting to th’ press to trudge,Where errors were not lessened (all may judg).At thy return my blushing was not small,My rambling brat (in…

    • John Bunyan, “Valiant-for-Truth’s Song”

      Who would true Valour seeLet him come hither;One here will Constant be,Come Wind, come Weather.There’s no Discouragement,Shall make him once Relent,His first avow’d Intent,To be a Pilgrim.Who so beset him round,With dismal Storys,Do but themselves Confound;His Strength the more is.No Lyon can him fright,He’l with a Gyant Fight,But he will have a right,To be a…

    • Henry Vaughan, “The Retreat”

      Happy those early dayes! when I Shin’d in my Angell-infancy. Before I understood this place Appointed for my second race, Or taught my soul to fancy oughtBut a white, Celestiall thought, When yet I had not walkt above A mile, or two, from my first love, And looking back (at that short space,) Could see…

    • The Most Brutal Scenes (new episode)

      An episode from 06/06/2024: Tonight, I share two stories from the Shoah, or Holocaust. The first is about the ⁠Sonderkommando⁠, those prisoners forced to do the most devastating work in the concentration camps. During a 2015 ⁠Fresh Air interview⁠ with László Nemes and Géza Röhrig about their 2015 film, ⁠Son of Saul⁠, a brief story…

    • Andrew Marvell, “The Garden”

      How vainly men themselves amazeTo win the Palm, the Oke, or Bayes;And their uncessant Labours seeCrown’d from some single Herb or Tree.Whose short and narrow vergèd ShadeDoes prudently their Toyles upbraid;While all Flow’rs and all Trees do closeTo weave the Garlands of repose.Fair quiet, have I found thee here,And Innocence thy Sister dear!Mistaken long, I…

    • Katharine Philips, “To My Excellent Lucasia, on Our Friendship. 17th. July 1651”

      I did not live until this time Crown’d my felicity,When I could say without a crime, I am not Thine, but Thee.This Carkasse breath’d, and walk’d, and slept, So that the world believ’dThere was a soule the motions kept; But they were all deceiv’d.For as a watch by art is wound To motion, such was…

    • Thomas Traherne, “The Preparative”

      1My Body being Dead, my Lims unknown;Before I skild to prizeThose living Stars mine Eys,Before my Tongue or Cheeks were to me shewn, Before I knew my Hands were mine,Or that my Sinews did my Members joyn, When neither Nostril, Foot, nor EarAs yet was seen, or felt, or did appear; I was withinA House…

    • Richard Leigh, “Greatness in Little”

      In spotted globes, that have resembled allWhich we or beasts possess to one great ballDim little specks for thronging cities stand,Lines wind for rivers, blots bound sea and land.Small are those spots which in the moon we view,Yet glasses these like shades of mountains shew;As what an even brightness does retain,A glorious level seems, and…

    • Anne Finch, “A Nocturnal Reverie”

      In such a Night, when every louder WindIs to its distant Cavern safe confin’d;And only gentle Zephyr fans his Wings,And lonely Philomel, still waking, sings;Or from some Tree, fam’d for the Owl’s delight,She, hollowing clear, directs the Wand’rer right:In such a Night, when passing Clouds give place,Or thinly vail the Heav’ns mysterious Face;When in some…

    • Alexander Pope, from “An Essay on Man”

      Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man. Plac’d on this isthmus of a middle state, A being darkly wise, and rudely great: With too much knowledge for the sceptic side, With too much weakness for the stoic’s pride, He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest;…

    • James Thomson, from “Summer”

      The daw,The rook, and magpie, to the grey-grown oaks(That the calm village in their verdant arms,Sheltering, embrace) direct their lazy flight;Where on the mingling boughs they sit emboweredAll the hot noon, till cooler hours arise.Faint underneath the household fowls convene;And, in a corner of the buzzing shade,The house-dog with the vacant greyhound liesOut-stretched and sleepy.…

    • Thomas Gray, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”

      The Curfew tolls the knell of parting day,The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea,The plowman homeward plods his weary way,And leaves the world to darkness and to me.Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,And all the air a solemn stillness holds,Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,And drowsy tinklings lull the distant…

    • True Horror

      An episode from 10/27/22: Tonight, I talk about our love horror and true crime, and ask: what makes a story truly frightening, instead of just entertaining? What kinds of movies or books, or ways of storytelling, take us beyond entertainment to true horror, to actual fear? For instance, how does the disturbing story of Ed…

    • Christopher Smart, from “Jubilate Agno”

      For the doubling of flowers is the improvement of the gardners talent.For the flowers are great blessings.For the Lord made a Nosegay in the meadow with his disciples and preached upon the lily.For the angels of God took it out of his hand and carried it to the Height.For a man cannot have publick spirit,…

    • Oliver Goldsmith, from “The Deserted Village”

      Sweet was the sound when oft at evening’s close, Up yonder hill the village murmur rose; There as I past with careless steps and slow, The mingling notes came softened from below; The swain responsive as the milk-maid sung, The sober herd that lowed to meet their young; The noisy geese that gabbled o’er the…

    • William Cowper, “The Contrite Heart”

      Isaiah lvii.15The LORD will happiness divine On contrite hearts bestow:Then tell me, gracious GOD, is mine A contrite heart, or no?I hear, but seem to hear in vain, Insensible as steel;If ought is felt, ’tis only pain, To find I cannot feel.I sometimes think myself inclin’d To love thee, if I could;But often feel another…

    • The Great Myths #24: Sigurd & the Dragon (new episode)

      An episode from 5/20/24: Tonight, after a long hiatus, we return to Norse myth with the story of Sigurd’s killing of the dragon, Fafnir. Couched in a much longer narrative that contains shape-shifting, war, revenge, brief appearances by Odin and Loki, and finally Sigurd’s ability to hear the language of birds and animals, it is…

    • Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Work Without Hope”

      All Nature seems at work – slugs leave their lair,The bees are stirring, birds are on the wing,And Winter slumbering in the open air,Wears on his smiling face a dream of spring!And I, the while, the sole unbusy thing,Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.Yet well I ken the banks where amaranths blow,Have…

    • William Blake, “Thou hearest the Nightingale begin the Song of Spring” (from “Milton”)

      Thou hearest the Nightingale begin the Song of Spring;The Lark sitting upon his earthy bed: just as the mornAppears; listens silent; then springing from the waving Corn-field! loudHe leads the Choir of Day! trill, trill, trill, trill,Mounting upon the wings of light into the Great Expanse:Reecchoing against the lovely blue & shining heavenly Shell:His little…

    • The Great Myths #22: The Story of Ragnarok in the Norse Eddas

      An episode from 12/23/22: How did the Viking Norse tell a story as important as Ragnarok (the end of the world) in poetry, and then in prose? What does prose require that poetry does not, and vice-versa, especially when the accounts we have are separated by centuries of historical change, and religious conversion? In this…

    • Mary Robinson, “A London Summer Morning”

      Who has not waked to list the busy sounds Of summer’s morning in the sultry smoke Of noisy London? On the pavement hot The sooty chimney-boy, with dingy face And tattered covering, shrilly hawks his trade, Rousing the sleepy housemaid. At the door The milk-pail rattles, and the tinkling bell Proclaims the dustman’s office, while…

    • William Wordsworth, “Was it for this”

      Was it for thisThat one, the fairest of all rivers, lovedTo blend his murmurs with my nurse’s song,And from his alder shades and rocky falls,And from his fords and shallows, sent a voiceThat flowed along my dreams? For this didst thou,O Derwent, travelling over the green plainsNear my ‘sweet birthplace’, didst thou, beauteous stream,Make ceaseless…

    • William Cullen Bryant, “The Prairies”

      These are the gardens of the Desert, theseThe unshorn fields, boundless and beautiful,For which the speech of England has no name –The Prairies. I behold them for the first,And my heart swells, while the dilated sightTakes in the encircling vastness. Lo! they stretch,In airy undulations, far away,As if the ocean, in his gentlest swell,Stood still,…

    • Walter Savage Landor, “The leaves are falling; so am I”

      The leaves are falling; so am I;The few late flowers have moisture in the eye; So have I too. Scarcely on any bough is heard Joyous, or even unjoyous, bird The whole wood through. Winter may come: he brings but nigherHis circle (yearly narrowing) to the fire Where old friends meet: Let him; now heaven…

    • Percy Bysshe Shelley, from “Adonais”

      The One remains, the many change and pass;Heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s shadows fly;Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,Stains the white radiance of Eternity,Until Death tramples it to fragments. – Die,If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!Follow where all is fled! – Rome’s azure sky,Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are weakThe…

    • John Clare, “Mouse’s Nest”

      I found a ball of grass among the hay And progged it as I passed and went away;And when I looked I fancied something stirred, And turned again and hoped to catch the bird – When out an old mouse bolted in the wheatsWith all her young ones hanging at her teats; She looked so…

    • Ted Hughes: 14 Poems from “Crow” (new episode)

      An episode from 5/8/24: Tonight, I read fourteen poems from Ted Hughes’s 1970 collection, Crow. His books Crow, Moortown Diary, Remains of Elmet, and River contain his best poetry, and they are models for any artist in how handle nature, animal life, myth, and autobiography in their work. The poems that read are: This is…

    • John Keats, “When I have fears that I may cease to be”

      When I have fears that I may cease to be Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,Before high-pilèd books, in charactery, Hold like rich garners the full ripened grain;When I behold, upon the night’s starred face, Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,And think that I may never live to trace Their shadows with…

    • Working

      An episode from 10/11/21: Tonight, a small episode where I talk about working, and about empathy and sympathy for those who live doing work they do not love, and which they derive little meaning from. Perhaps it describes you, or someone you know. You can support Human Voices Wake Us here, or by ordering any of…

    • Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Snow-Storm”

      Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,Arrives the snow, and, driving o’er the fields,Seems nowhere to alight: the whited airHides hills and woods, the river, and the heaven,And veils the farm-house at the garden’s end.The sled and traveller stopped, the courier’s feetDelayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sitAround the radiant fireplace, enclosedIn a…

    • Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 3 Sonnets from the Portuguese

      41I thank all who have loved me in their hearts,With thanks and love from mine. Deep thanks to allWho paused a little near the prison-wall,To hear my music in its louder parts,Ere they went onward, each one to the mart’sOr temple’s occupation, beyond call.But thou, who in my voice’s sink and fall,When the sob took…

    • First Person: Funeral Home Director // Telemarketer

      An episode from 3/8/22: How would you talk about your job, if someone came around asking? Tonight, we hear from Beverly Valentine, a Funeral Home Director, and Jason Groth, a Telemarketer. They were interviewed more than twenty years ago for the 2000 book Gig: Americans Talking About Their Jobs , and I have yet to…

    • Edward Fitzgerald, from “The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam”

      25Why, all the Saints and Sages who discuss’dOf the Two Worlds so learnedly, are thrust Like foolish Prophets forth; their Words to ScornAre scatter’d, and their Mouths are stopt with Dust. 26Oh, come with old Khayyám, and leave the WiseTo talk; one thing is certain, that Life flies; One thing is certain, and the Rest…

    • Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Ulysses”

      It little profits that an idle king,By this still hearth, among these barren crags,Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and doleUnequal laws unto a savage race,That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.I cannot rest from travel: I will drinkLife to the lees: All times I have enjoy’dGreatly, have suffer’d greatly, both…

    • Emily Brontë, “Remembrance”

      Cold in the earth – and the deep snow piled above thee,Far, far removed, cold in the dreary grave!Have I forgot, my only Love, to love thee,Severed at last by Time’s all-severing wave?Now, when alone, do my thoughts no longer hoverOver the mountains, on that northern shore,Resting their wings where heath and fern-leaves coverThy noble…

    • Walt Whitman, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”

      Flood-tide of the river, flow on! I watch you, face to face,Clouds of the west! sun half an hour high! I see you also face to face.Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, how curious you are to me!On the ferry-boats the hundreds and hundreds that cross are more curious to me…

    • Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach”

      The sea is calm to-night.The tide is full, the moon lies fairUpon the straits; – on the French coast the lightGleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!Only, from the long line of sprayWhere the sea meets the moon-blanch’d land,Listen!…

    • Emily Dickinson, “Some keep the Sabbath going to Church”

      Some keep the Sabbath going to Church –I keep it, staying at Home –With a Bobolink for a Chorister –And an Orchard, for a Dome –Some keep the Sabbath in Surplice –I, just wear my Wings –And instead of tolling the Bell, for Church,Our little Sexton – sings.God preaches, a noted Clergyman –And the sermon…

    • Walt Whitman’s Mystical Poems

      An episode from 4/19/22: From the opening line of the Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman announced that his great theme was unity: “I celebrate myself,/And what I assume you shall assume,/For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” As the last two episodes show, his best poems on both love and death…

    • Christina Rossetti, “Up-Hill”

      Does the road wind up-hill all the way? Yes, to the very end.Will the day’s journey take the whole long day? From morn to night, my friend.But is there for the night a resting-place? A roof for when the slow dark hours begin.May not the darkness hide it from my face? You cannot miss that…

    • Caravaggio / Herodotus / Macbeth

      An episode from 9/8/23: In the first part of tonight’s episode, I read from Peter Robb’s M, a biography of the painter Caravaggio (1571-1610). Through a discussion of two of his paintings which depict decapitation, we can understand how, in Caravaggio’s early career, he was able to paint directly from life; but when he went on the run…

    • William Morris, “Pomona”

      I am the ancient Apple-Queen,As once I was so am I now.For evermore a hope unseen,Betwixt the blossom and the bough.Ah, where’s the river’s hidden Gold!And where the windy grave of Troy?Yet come I as I came of old,From out the heart of Summer’s joy. William Morris, 1834-1896 – “Pomona” from Selected Poems

    • Thomas Hardy, “The Man He Killed”

      “Had he and I but met By some old ancient inn,We should have sat us down to wet Right many a nipperkin! “But ranged as infantry, And staring face to face,I shot at him as he at me, And killed him in his place. “I shot him dead because – Because he was my foe,Just…

    • Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Pied Beauty”

      Glory be to God for dappled things – For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough; And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. All things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is…

    • Four Columbine Poems

      An episode from 4/19/21: While I was already out of high school for two years when Columbine happened on April 20, 1999, it still feels bound up with everything I went through from 1993-1997. I spend the first part of this episode talking about high school, and how much my writing from this time is…

    • Robert Louis Stevenson, “To Mrs Will H. Low”

      Even in the bluest noonday of July,There could not run the smallest breath of windBut all the quarter sounded like a wood;And in the chequered silence and aboveThe hum of city cabs that sought the Bois,Suburban ashes shivered into song.A patter and a chatter and a chirpAnd a long dying hiss – it was as…

    • Anthology: Poems on Modern Life (new episode)

      An episode from 4/17/24: Tonight, I read a handful of poems on modern life—whatever “modern” might mean in words spanning the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. In many of the poems we hear the complaint of every age, that “the world has never been so bad.” In others, descriptions of the suburbs are enough, or…

    • A. Mary F. Robinson, “Twilight”

      When I was young the twilight seemed too long, How often on the western window seat I leaned my book against the misty pane And spelled the last enchanting lines again, The while my mother hummed an ancient song, Or sighed a little and said: “The hour is sweet!” When I, rebellious, clamoured for the…

    • Two Bits of Kafka’s Trial

      An episode from 11/01/20: Tonight, I read two passages from Franz Kafka’s The Trial: the fable known as “Before the Law,” and the concluding scene, where Josef K. is executed. Kafka’s ability to portray those who are powerless when faced with vast bureaucracy, or simply before the rituals of everyday interaction (which many also find…

    • E. Nesbit, “The Things That Matter”

      Now that I’ve nearly done my days, And grown too stiff to sweep or sew,I sit and think, till I’m amaze, About what lots of things I know:Things as I’ve found out one by one– And when I’m fast down in the clay,My knowing things and how they’re done Will all be lost and thrown…

    • A. E. Housman, “Loveliest of trees, the cherry now”

      Loveliest of trees, the cherry now Is hung with bloom along the bough, And stands about the woodland ride Wearing white for Eastertide. Now, of my threescore years and ten,Twenty will not come again, And take from seventy springs a score, It only leaves me fifty more. And since to look at things in bloom…

    • Emily Dickinson

      An episode from 7/11/22: How do we find our way past the image of Emily Dickinson as a distant, unapproachable, recluse? One way is to read a book like Brenda Wineapple’s ⁠White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson⁠, and tonight I share my favorite passages from it. Dickinson and Higginson were both…

    • May Kendall, “The Lay of the Trilobite”

      A mountain’s giddy height I sought, Because I could not findSufficient vague and mighty thought To fill my mighty mind;And as I wandered ill at ease, There chanced upon my sightA native of Silurian seas, An ancient Trilobite.So calm, so peacefully he lay, I watched him even with tears:I thought of Monads far away In…

    • Walter de la Mare, “The Railway Junction”

      From here through tunnelled gloom the track Forks into two; and one of these Wheels onward into darkening hills, And one toward distant seas. How still it is; the signal light At set of sun shines palely green; A thrush sings; other sound there’s none, Nor traveller to be seen –Where late there was a…

    • W. B. Yeats, “The Song of Wandering Aengus”

      I went out to the hazel wood,Because a fire was in my head,And cut and peeled a hazel wand,And hooked a berry to a thread;And when white moths were on the wing,And moth-like stars were flickering out,I dropped the berry in a streamAnd caught a little silver trout.When I had laid it on the floorI…

    • The Great Myths #6: The Egyptian Book of the Dead

      An episode from 2/19/21: In this third episode on Egyptian mythology, I give a brief introduction to the famous Book of the Dead, and then read from the longest chapter in the book, Chapter 125. Both come from Miriam Lichtheim’s Ancient Egyptian Literature, vol. 2: The New Kingdom. Other episodes on Egyptian mythology ⁠are here⁠. You can support…

    • Edgar Lee Masters, “Minerva Jones”

      I am Minerva, the village poetess,Hooted at, jeered at by the Yahoos of the streetFor my heavy body, cock-eye, and rolling walk,And all the more when “Butch” WeldyCaptured me after a brutal hunt.He left me to my fate with Doctor Meyers;And I sank into death, growing numb from the feet up,Like one stepping deeper and…

    • Charlotte Mew, “À quoi bon dire”

      Seventeen years ago you said Something that sounded like Good-bye; And everybody thinks that you are dead, But I.So I, as I grow stiff and cold To this and that say Good-bye too; And everybody sees that I am old But you.And one fine morning in a sunny lane Some boy and girl will meet…

    • Laurence Binyon, from “The Burning of the Leaves”

      Now is the time for the burning of the leaves.They go to the fire; the nostril pricks with smokeWandering slowly into a weeping mist.Brittle and blotched, ragged and rotten sheaves!A flame seizes the smouldering ruin and bitesOn stubborn stalks that crackle as they resist.The last hollyhock’s fallen tower is dust;All the spices of June are…

    • Stephen Crane, “The Heart”

      In the desertI saw a creature, naked, bestial,Who, squatting upon the ground,Held his heart in his hands,And ate of it.I said, “Is it good, friend?”“It is bitter – bitter,” he answered;“But I like it“Because it is bitter,“And because it is my heart.” Stephen Crane, 1877-1900 – “The Heart” from Complete Poems

    • An Interview with Amit Majmudar (new episode)

      An episode from 4/3/24: Tonight, I interview the poet, novelist and translator, Amit Majmudar. You can find a full list of his books here, but we spend most of our time talking about his 2018 translation of the Bhagavad Gita, Godsong. Along the way, we also get his take on many of the preoccupations of…

    • Amy Lowell, “New Heavens for Old”

      I am useless.What I do is nothing,What I think has no savour.There is an almanac between the windows:It is of the year when I was born.My fellows call to me to join them,They shout for me,Passing the house in a great wind of vermilion banners.They are fresh and fulminant,They are indecent and strut with the…

    • Robert Frost, “After Apple-Picking”

      My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a treeToward heaven still,And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fillBeside it, and there may be two or threeApples I didn’t pick upon some bough.But I am done with apple-picking now.Essence of winter sleep is on the night,The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.I cannot rub the strangeness…

    • “The Boys of Sumer” (from the Akkadian)

      One of the earliest surviving laments in world literature, “The Boys of Sumer” remains an outlier of the genre. Few other poems from the Babylonian corpus include so much: aspects of contemporary life, magic, dreams, among the earliest recorded use of colorful insults, and unrequited love. There is also some indication that this poem would…

    • Marsden Hartley, “As the Buck Lay Dead”

      As the buck lay dead, tied to the fenderof a carcoming down from Matagomon way,I saw dried blood on his tongue ofa thousand summer dreams and wintercogitations –the scratches on his hooves were signaturesof the many pungent sticks and branches.The torn place in his chest was madeby a manletting out visceral debris to save weight-givingmorsels…

    • The Great Myths #17: Tales of the Elders of Ireland (Celtic)

      An episode from 3/22/22: One of my goals for The Great Myths has been to show how strange, even off-putting, the stories that we know and revere really are. I don’t know of a better example of this than the largest literary text surviving from twelfth-century Ireland, The Tales of the Elders of Ireland (⁠Acallam na Senórach⁠).…

    • John Masefield, “Sea-Fever”

      I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by;And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking. I must…

    • Carl Sandburg, “Mag”

      I wish to God I never saw you, Mag.I wish you never quit your job and came along with me.I wish we never bought a license and a white dressFor you to get married in the day we ran off to a ministerAnd told him we would love each other and take care of each…

    • Van Gogh: Starry Nights & Sunflowers

      An episode from 7/27/22: Tonight, I read from Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith’s ⁠Van Gogh: The Life⁠, sharing the sections covering Van Gogh’s ⁠two Starry Night paintings⁠, and his ⁠many paintings of sunflowers⁠. Before these images became cultural touchstones, they were the product of a largely unknown artist working in the south of France in the late…

    • Edward Thomas, “Digging”

      To-day I think Only with scents, – scents dead leaves yield, And bracken, and wild carrot’s seed, And the square mustard field; Odours that rise When the spade wounds the root of tree, Rose, currant, raspberry, or goutweed, Rhubarb or celery; The smoke’s smell, too, Flowing from where a bonfire burns The dead, the waste,…

    • Wallace Stevens, “How to Live. What to Do”

      Last evening the moon rose above this rockImpure upon a world unpurged.The man and his companion stoppedTo rest before the heroic height.Coldly the wind fell upon themIn many majesties of sound:They that had left the flame-freaked sunTo seek a sun of fuller fire.Instead there was this tufted rockMassively rising high and bareBeyond all trees, the…

    • Witter Bynner, “Wistaria”

      Clouds dream and disappear;Waters dream in a rainbow and are gone;Fire-dreams change with the sunOr when a poppy closes;But now is the time of yearFor the dark earth, one by one,To show her slower dreams. And nothing she has ever doneHas given more easeTo her perplexitiesThan the dreaming of dreams like these:Not irises,Not any spearOf…

    • Advice from Whitman & Yeats

      An episode from 10/20/21: Tonight, we hear anecdotes from the lives of two very different poets, Walt Whitman and W. B. Yeats. The remarks from Whitman come from the journals he kept while working out the poems that went into the first edition of Leaves of Grass, while the comments from Yeats span the first…

    • Abbie Huston Evans, “The Old Yellow Shop”

      In farming country you are sure to find them, Little gray wooden buildings boarded up, Astride a stone wall, or lost in a thicket, With what shut in? – Well, I think if you pried A warped board free and climbed in through a window,You might find much the same thing as I found In…

    • Sara Teasdale, “Moonlight”

      It will not hurt me when I am old, A running tide where moonlight burned Will not sting me like silver snakes;The years will make me sad and cold, It is the happy heart that breaks.The heart asks more than life can give, When that is learned, then all is learned; The waves break fold…

    • T. E. Hulme, “Image”

      Old houses were scaffolding once and workmen whistling. T. E. Hulme, 1883-1917 – “Image” from Selected Writings

    • Caravaggio, Herodotus & Ian McKellan

      An episode from 9/8/23: In the first part of tonight’s episode, I read from Peter Robb’s M, a biography of the painter Caravaggio (1571-1610). Through a discussion of two of his paintings which depict decapitation, we can understand how, in Caravaggio’s early career, he was able to paint directly from life; but when he went on the run…

    • Elinor Wylie, “Wild Peaches”

      1 When the world turns completely upside downYou say we’ll emigrate to the Eastern ShoreAboard a river-boat from Baltimore;We’ll live among wild peach trees, miles from town,You’ll wear a coonskin cap, and I a gownHomespun, dyed butternut’s dark gold color.Lost, like your lotus-eating ancestor,We’ll swim in milk and honey till we drown.The winter will be…

    • D. H. Lawrence, “The Piano”

      Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;Taking me back down the vista of years, till I seeA child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling stringsAnd pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of songBetrays me back,…

    • Robinson Jeffers, “Inscription for a Gravestone”

      I am not dead, I have only become inhuman:That is to say,Undressed myself of laughable prides and infirmities,But not as a manUndresses to creep into bed, but like an athleteStripping for the race.The delicate ravel of nerves that made me a measurerOf certain fictionsCalled good and evil; that made me contract with painAnd expand with…

    • Ted Hughes: 11 Poems from “Remains of Elmet” (new episode)

      An episode from 3/15/24: Tonight, I read eleven poems from Ted Hughes’s 1979 collection, Remains of Elmet. His books Crow, Moortown Diary, Remains of Elmet, and River contain his best poetry, and they are models for any artist in how handle nature, animal life, myth, and autobiography in their work. The poems that I read…

    • H. D., “Wine Bowl”

      I will risefrom my trothwith the dead,I will sweeten my cupand my breadwith a gift;I will chisel a bowl for the wine,for the white wineand red;I will summon a Satyr to dance,a Centaur,a Nymphand a Faun;I will picturea warrior King,a Giant,a Naiad,a Monster;I will cut round the rim of the crater,some simple familiar thing,vine leavesor…

    • Siegfried Sassoon, “Attack”

      At dawn the ridge emerges massed and dun In the wild purple of the glow’ring sun, Smouldering through spouts of drifting smoke that shroud The menacing scarred slope; and, one by one, Tanks creep and topple forward to the wire. The barrage roars and lifts. Then, clumsily bowed With bombs and guns and shovels and…

    • Shakespeare: The Life & Times

      You can support Human Voices Wake Us here, or by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I’ve also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series. Email me at humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com.

    • Rupert Brooke, “The Soldier”

      If I should die, think only this of me: That there’s some corner of a foreign fieldThat is for ever England. There shall be In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam;A body of England’s, breathing English air,…

    • T. S. Eliot, from “Burnt Norton”

      Footfalls echo in the memoryDown the passage which we did not takeTowards the door we never openedInto the rose-garden. My words echoThus, in your mind. But to what purposeDisturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leavesI do not know. Other echoesInhabit the garden. Shall we follow?Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,Round the corner.…

    • The Great Myths #7: Herodotus on Ancient Egypt

      You can support Human Voices Wake Us here, or by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I’ve also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series. Email me at humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com.

    • Archibald MacLeish, “Voyage West”

      There was a time for discoveries –For the headlands looming above in theFirst light and the surf and theCrying of gulls: for the curve of theCoast north into secrecy.That time is past.The last lands have been peopled.The oceans are known now.Señora: once the maps have all been madeA man were better dead than find new…

    • Alan Seeger, “Rendezvous”

      I have a rendezvous with DeathAt some disputed barricade,When Spring comes back with rustling shadeAnd apple-blossoms fill the air –I have a rendezvous with DeathWhen Spring brings back blue days and fair.It may be he shall take my handAnd lead me into his dark landAnd close my eyes and quench my breath –It may be…

    • Conrad Aiken, “The Room”

      Through that window – all else being extinctExcept itself and me – I saw the struggleOf darkness against darkness. Within the roomIt turned and turned, diving downward. Then I sawHow order might – if chaos wished – become:And saw the darkness crush upon itself,Contracting powerfully; it was as ifIt killed itself slowly: and with much…

    • Robinson Jeffers: 10 Essential Poems

      An episode from 9/23/22: What twentieth-century American poet devoted so much time to the environment, and to humanity’s place in it, other than Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962)? What other poet devoted his powers not to the puzzles of Modernism but to the plain-spoken strengths of science, prophecy, and myth? Tonight I read ten of Jeffers’ essential…

    • e.e. cummings, “O sweet spontaneous”

      O sweet spontaneousearth how often havethedoting fingers ofprurient philosophers pinchedandpoked thee,has the naughty thumbof science proddedthy beauty .howoften have religions takenthee upon their scraggy kneessqueezing and buffeting thee that thou mightest conceivegods (buttrue to the incomparablecouch of death thyrhythmiclover thou answerest them only with spring) e.e. cummings, 1894-1962 – “O sweet spontaneous” from Complete Poems

    • Anthology: Visionary Poems from Yeats, Whitman, Blake & Myth (new episode)

      An episode from 3/3/24: Tonight, I read from a handful of what I call “visionary” poems. After an introductory section of familiar nineteenth- and twentieth-century poets, I go back to the sources of those, which are found in religious scripture and myth: You can support Human Voices Wake Us here, or by ordering any of…

    • Advice from the Beatles

      An episode from 4/26/23: What can the stories of the early lives of famous people teach us about our own upbringing, all the details nobody would know if they aren’t told to someone? Tonight, I read from the scattered remarks of John, Paul, George, and Ringo that are found at the beginning of the huge…

    • C. Day-Lewis, “My Mother’s Sister”

      I see her against the pearl sky of Dublin Before the turn of the century, a young woman With all those brothers and sisters, green eyes, hair She could sit on; for high life, a meandering sermon (Church of Ireland) each Sunday, window-shopping In Dawson Street, picnics at Killiney and Howth … To know so…

    • Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Spring”

      To what purpose, April, do you return again?Beauty is not enough.You can no longer quiet me with the rednessOf little leaves opening stickily.I know what I know.The sun is hot on my neck as I observeThe spikes of the crocus.The smell of the earth is good.It is apparent that there is no death.But what does…

    • V. Sackville-West, “Craftsmen”

      All craftsmen share a knowledge. They have heldReality down fluttering to a bench;Cut wood to their own purposes; compelledThe growth of pattern with the patient shuttle;Drained acres to a trench.Control is theirs. They have ignored the subtleRelease of spirit from the jail of shape.They have been concerned with prison, not escape;Pinioned the fact, and let…

    • Walt Whitman Affirms the World

      You can support Human Voices Wake Us here, or by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I’ve also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series. Email me at humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com.

    • Wilfred Owen, “Disabled”

      He sat in a wheeled chair, waiting for dark,And shivered in his ghastly suit of grey,Legless, sewn short at elbow. Through the park Voices of boys rang saddening like a hymn, Voices of play and pleasure after day, Till gathering sleep had mothered them from him. *About this time Town used to swing so gay…

    • Ruth Pitter, “But For Lust”

      But for lust we could be friends, On each other’s necks could weep: In each other’s arms could sleep In the calm the cradle lends: Lends awhile, and takes away. But for hunger, but for fear, Calm could be our day and year From the yellow to the grey: From the gold to the grey…

    • Anthology: “Is Poetry Important?” With poems by Shakespeare, Virgil, Emily Dickinson, & R. S. Thomas

      An episode from 1/1/22: What can we say when we’re told that poetry no longer matters, especially when it’s another poet who says it? The first eleven minutes of this episode are my best defense for what poetry is and can be, while the rest offers and handful of poems which suggest that poetry is…