For to know nothing is nothing, not to want to know anything likewise, but to be beyond knowing anything, to know you are beyond knowing anything, that is when peace enters in, to the soul of the incurious seeker.

— Samuel Beckett

When trying to hold an interview with reality face to face, without the aid of either words or concepts, we realize that what is intelligible to our mind is but a thin surface of the profoundly undisclosed, a ripple of inveterate silence that remains immune to curiosity and inquisitiveness like distant foliage in the dark.

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

The tide erases the path through the mud flats
and makes things on all sides look the same.
But the little island out there has closed its eyes.
The dike around it walls its people in.

They are as if born into a sleep
that silently blurs all destinations.
They seldom speak,
and every utterance is like an epitaph

for something cast ashore, some foreign object
that comes unexplained, and just stays.
So is everything their gaze encounters from childhood on:

not intended for them, random, unwieldy,
sent from someone else
to underscore their loneliness.

— Rilke, New Poems

Every something is an echo of nothing.

— John Cage

Silence is not the absence of sound. It’s a physical place, a destination with value and meaning in a chaotic world, somewhere arrived at with difficulty and left with regret.

— Kenneth Turan

I had a feeling once about Mathematics, that I saw it all — Depth beyond depth was revealed to me — the Byss and the Abyss. I saw, as one might see the transit of Venus — or even the Lord Mayor’s Show, a quantity passing through infinity and changing its sign from plus to minus. I saw exactly how it happened and why the tergiversation was inevitable: and how the one step involved all the others. . . . But it was after dinner and I let it go!

— Winston Churchill

Between hammers pounding,
the heart exists, like the tongue
between the teeth — which still,
however, does the praising.

— Rilke, From the Ninth Duino Elegy

Backward I see in my own days where I sweated through
……fog with linguists and contenders,
I have no mockings or arguments, I witness and wait.

— Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” 4

Gold leads a pampered life, protected by banks,
on intimate terms with the best people.
The homeless beggar is no more than a lost coin
fallen behind the bookcase or in the dustpile under the bed.

In the finest shops, money is right at home,
loving to parade itself in flowers, silk and furs.
He, the silent one, stands outside this display.
Money, near him, stops breathing.

How does his outstretched hand ever close at night?
Fate, each morning, picks it up again,
holds it out there, naked and raw.

In order to grasp what his life is like,
to see it and cherish it, you would need a song,
a song only a god could bear to hear.

— Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus II, 19

GEOFFREY CHAUCER

from The Canterbury Tales
The General Prologue
The Wife of Bath’s Prologue
The Pardoner’s Prologue

WILLIAM DUNBAR

Lament for the Makers

SIR THOMAS WYATT

Whoso List to Hunt
They Flee from Me

SIR PHILIP SIDNEY

Astrophel and Stella

EDMUND SPENSER

The Faerie Queene: The Gardens of Adonis
Epithalamion
Prothalamion

SIR WALTER RALEGH

The Ocean to Cynthia
Answer to Marlowe

CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE

Tichborne’s Elegy

ROBERT SOUTHWELL

The Burning Babe

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE

Tamburlaine
The Passionate Shepard to His Love

MICHAEL DRAYTON

Idea

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

The Phoenix and Turtle
Hamlet
Troilus and Cressida
Measure for Measure
King Lear
The Tempest

Sonnets
…XIX: “Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion’s paws,”
…XXX: “When to the sessions of sweet silent thought”
…LIII: “What is your substance, whereof are you made,”
…LV: “Not marble, nor the gilded monuments”
…LXXIII: “That time of year thou mayst in me behold”
…LXXXVI: “Was it the proud full sail of this great verse,”
…LXXXVII: “Farewell — thou art too dear for my possessing,”
…XCIV: “They that have power to hurt and will do none,”
…CVII: “Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul”
…CXVI: “Let me not to the marriage of true minds”
…CXXI: ” ‘Tis better to be vile than vile esteemed,”
…CXXIX: “The expense of spirit in a waste of shame,”
…CXXX: “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;”
…CXLIV: “Two loves I have, of comfort and despair,”

Songs
…Dirge
…When That I Was and a Little Tiny Boy
…Autolycus’ Song
…Autolycus As Peddler

THOMAS NASHE

Litany in Time of Plague

THOMAS CAMPION

There Is a Garden in Her Face
When to Her Lute Corinna Sings
When Thou Must Home to Shades of Under Ground

JOHN DONNE

Song
A Nocturnal upon S. Lucy’s Day, Being the Shortest Day
The Ecstasy
Hymn to God My God, in My Sickness
A Hymn to God the Father

BEN JOHNSON

To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author Mr. William Shakespeare
Song: To Celia [1606]
Song: To Celia [1616]
Clerimont’s Song

ANONYMOUS

Tom o’ Bedlam’s Song

JOHN CLEVELAND

Mark Antony

JAMES SHIRLEY

Dirge

ROBERT HERRICK

To the Virgins, To Make Much of Time
Upon Julia’s Clothes
Delight in Disorder

THOMAS CAREW

A Rapture
Song

RICHARD LOVELACE

La Bella Bona Roba
Song
To Althea, from Prison

SIR JOHN SUCKLING

Song
“Out upon it! I have loved”

EDMUND WALLER

Song

ANDREW MARVELL

To His Coy Mistress
The Mower Against Gardens
The Mower to the Glowworms
The Garden
An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland

GEORGE HERBERT

The Collar
Jordan (I)
Jordan (II)
Church Monuments
Love (III)

RICHARD CRASHAW

The flaming Heart

HENRY VAUGHAN

Peace
The World
“They are all gone into the world of light!”
Cock-Crowing

THOMAS TRAHERNE

Shadows in the Water

JOHN MILTON

Sonnets
…XVII: “When I consider how my light is spent,”
…XVIII: “Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones”
…XIX: “Methought I saw my late espousèd saint”
Lycidas
Paradise Lost
Samson Agonistes

JOHN DRYDEN

Religio Laici
To the Memory of Mr. Oldham
Lines on Milton

JOHN WILMOT, EARL OF ROCHESTER

A Song of a young Lady

ALEXANDER POPE

Epistle to Augustus
The Rape of the Lock
The Dunciad

SAMUEL JOHNSON

The Vanity of Human Wishes

WILLIAM COLLINS

Ode, Written in the beginning of the Year 1748
Ode to Evening

THOMAS GRAY

Elegy Written in a Country Courtyard

CHRISTOPHER SMART

Jubilate Agno

WILLIAM COWPER

The Castaway

ROBERT BURNS

Address to the Devil
Holy Willie’s Prayer
Scots Wha Hae

WILLIAM BLAKE

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Songs of Innocence and of Experience
The Sick Rose
The Tyger
Ah! Sun-flower
London
The Mental Traveller
The Crystal Cabinet
The Four Zoas
Milton
Jerusalem
The Gates of Paradise

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

Tintern Abbey
Lines
The Lucy Poems
“Strange fits of passion have I known:”
“She dwelt among the untrodden ways”
“Three years she grew in sun and shower,”
“A slumber did my spirit seal;”
“I travelled among unknown men,”

Resolution and Independence
Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
The Solitary Reaper
The Prelude

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Kubla Khan
Christabel
Dejection: An Ode

GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON

Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, A Romaunt
Don Juan
On This Day I Complete My Thirty-sixth Year

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLY

Prometheus Unbound
Ode to the West Wind
The Two Spirits: An Allegory
Epipsychidion
Adonais
Hellas
With a Guitar, to Jane
Lines Written in the Bay of Lerici
The Triumph of Life

JOHN KEATS

On the Sea
La Bella Dame Sans Merci
Ode of Psyche
Ode to a Nightingale
Ode on a Grecian Urn
Ode on Melancholy
Hyperion
The Fall of Hyperion
To Autumn
Bright Star
This Living Hand

WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR

[Rose Aylmer, 1779-1800]
Dirce
On His Seventy-fifth Birthday

THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK

Song by Mr. Cypress
The War-Song of Dinas Vawr

JOHN CLARE

from Badger
[John Clare]
I Am
An Invite to Eternity
A Vision
Song [Secret Love]

GEORGE DARLEY

It Is Not Beauty I Demand
The Phoenix

THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES

Lines
Song
Song of the Stygian Naiades

WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT

To a Waterfowl

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Uriel
Ode, Inscribed to W. H. Channing
Bacchus
Days

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

Snow-Flakes
The Cross of Snow
The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls
The Bells of San Blas

EDGAR ALLEN POE

Israfel
The City in the Sea

JONES VERY

The New Birth
The Dead

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

“My life has been the poem I would have writ,”
“I am a parcel of vain strivings tied”
“Light-winged Smoke, Icarian bird,”

JULIA WARD HOWE

Battle-Hymn of the Republic

WALT WHITMAN

Song of Myself
As Adam Early in the Morning
Crossing Brooklyn Ferry
“Out of the cradle endlessly rocking,”
“As I ebb’d with the ocean of life,”
When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d
The Last Invocation

HERMAN MELVILLE

The Portent
Fragments of a Lost Gnostic Poem of the 12th Century
The Maldive Shark

Emily Dickinson

“There’s a certain Slant of light,”
“I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,”
“From Blank to Blank –”
“After great pain, a formal feeling comes –”
“I started Early — Took my Dog –”
“This Consciousness that is aware”
“Our journey had advanced –”
“The Tint I cannot take — is best –”
“Because I could not stop for Death –”
“My Life had stood — a Loaded Gun –”
“A Light exists in Spring”
“Tell all the Truth but tell it slant –”
“In Winter in my Room”
“Because that you are going”
“A Pit — but Heaven over it –”
“By a departing light”
“I dwell in Possibility –”
“Through what transports of Patience”
“We grow accustomed to the Dark –”
“No man saw awe, nor to his house”

ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

Mariana
The Eagle
Ulysses
Morte d’Arthur
from The Princess
…The Splendour Falls
…Tears, Idle Tears
In Memoriam A. H. H.
Maud: A Monodrama
Crossing the Bar

EDWARD FITZGERALD

The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

ROBERT BROWNING

My Last Duchess
Fra Lippo Lippi
A Toccata of Galuppi’s
“Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”
Andrea del Sarto

MATTHEW ARNOLD

Dover Beach

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

No Worst, There is None
I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark
Thou Art Indeed Just, Lord
To R. B.

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI

The Blessed Damozel
Sestina (after Dante)
from The House of Life
…Willowwood
…The Orchard-Pit

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI

Goblin Market
Song
Remember
Passing Away
A Birthday
Up-Hill

WILLIAM MORRIS

Near Avalon
A Garden by the Sea

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE

August
At a Month’s End

EMILY BRONTË

Stanzas
Last Lines

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING

A Musical Instrument

EDWARD LEAR

The Owl and the Pussy-Cat
The Jumblies
The Courtship of the Youghy-Bonghy-Bò
The Floating Old Man

LEWIS CARROLL

The Hunting of the Snark
The Mad Gardener’s Song
A Pig-Tale
The Walrus and the Carpenter

GEORGE MEREDITH

Modern Love
A Ballad of Past Meridian

RUDYARD KIPLING

The Vampire
The Way Through the Woods

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

The Song of Wandering Aengus
Adam’s Curse
The Cold Heaven
The Second Coming
The Wild Swans at Coole
The Double Vision of Michael Robartes

LIONEL JOHNSON

The Dark Angel

ERNEST DOWSON

Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae

THOMAS HARDY

Neutral Tones
The Darkling Thrush
During Wind and Rain
Moments of Vision
Afterwards

ROBERT BRIDGES

London Snow
Nightingales

D. H. Lawrence

Medlars and Sorb-Apples
The Song of a Man Who Has Come Through
Tortoise Shout
Snake
The Ship of Death
Bavarian Gentians
Shadows

A. E. HOUSMAN

A Shropshire Lad
Last Poems

WILFRED OWEN

Futility
Strange Meeting
Anthem for Doomed Youth

EDWARD THOMAS

Liberty
The Owl
The Gallows

ISAAC ROSENBERG

Returning, We Hear the Larks
A Worm Fed on the Heart of Corinth

EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON

Luke Havergal
For a Dead Lady
Eros Turannos

STEPHEN CRANE

War is Kind

TRUMBULL STICKNEY

Mnemosyne
Eride, V

ROBERT FROST

After Apple-Picking
The Wood-Pile
The Oven Bird
Birches
Putting in the Seed
Design
Never Again Would Birds’ Song Be the Same
Directive

WALLACE STEVENS

Sunday Morning
Domination of Black
Nomad Exquisite
The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad
The Snow Man
Tea at the Palaz of Hoon
The Idea of Order at Key West
The Poems of Our Climate
The Auroras of Autumn
The Course of a Particular
Of Mere Being

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

Queen-Anne’s-Lace
The Widow’s Lament in Springtime
Spring and All

EZRA POUND

A Pact
Planh for the Young English King

ELINOR WYLIE

Wild Peaches

H. D. (HILDA DOOLITTLE)

Orchard
Garden

ROBINSON JEFFERS

Shine, Perishing Republic
Apology for Bad Dreams

MARIANNE MOORE

Marriage

T. S. (THOMAS STEARNS) ELIOT

The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock
Preludes
La Figlia Che Piange
The Waste Land

JOHN CROWE RANSOM

Here Lies a Lady
Captain Carpenter
Blue Girls

CONRAD AIKEN

Morning Song of Senlin
And in the Hanging Gardens
Sea Holly
Preludes for Memnon

EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY

“If I should learn, in some quite casual way,”

LOUISE BOGAN

Women
Men Loved Wholly Beyond Wisdom

JOHN BROOKS WHEELWRIGHT

Fish Food
Come Over and Help Us

LÉONIE ADAMS

April Mortality
The Horn
Grapes Making
Bell Tower

ALLEN TATE

Aeneas at Washington
The Mediterranean

HART CRANE

Repose of Rivers
Voyages
At Melville’s Tomb
from The Bridge
…To Brooklyn Bridge
…The Tunnel
…Atlantis
The Broken Tower

The tragedy of nations is perhaps this: that even the best rulers use up a piece of their people’s future.

— Rilke, Early Journals

Dove that stayed in the open, outside the dovecote,
brought back and housed again
where neither night nor day poses danger —
she knows what protection is. . . .

The other doves not exposed to peril
do not know this tenderness.
The heart that has been fetched back can feel most at home.
Vitality is freed through what it has renounced.

Over Nothingness the universe bends.
Ah, the ball we dared to throw
fills the hands differently on its return:
it brings back the reality of its journey.

— Rilke, Uncollected Poems

A rose by itself is every rose.
And this one is irreplaceable,
perfect, one sufficient word
in the context of all things.

Without what we see in her,
how can we speak our hopes
or endure a tender moment
in the winds of departure.

— Rilke, Les Roses
From Rilke’s collected French poems

Oh, not to be separated,
shut off from the starry dimensions
by so thin a wall.

What is within us
if not intensified sky
traversed with birds

and deep
with winds of homecoming?

— Rilke, Uncollected Poems

My hands are bloody from digging.
I lift them, hold them open in the wind,
so they can branch like a tree.

Reaching, these hands would pull you out of the sky
as if you had shattered there,
dashed yourself to pieces in some wild impatience.

What is this I feel falling now,
falling on this parched earth,
softly,
like a spring rain?

— Rilke, From The Book of Hours II, 34

As for me, my internal pace is slow. Mine is the intrinsic slowness of the tree that embraces its growth and its blooming. Yes, I have a bit of its admirable patience. I had to train myself in it from the moment I understood the secret slowness that engenders and distills any work of art. But if I know its temporal measure, I know nothing of its immobility. Oh, the joys of travel!

— Rilke, Letter to a friend
February 3, 1923