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Rae Armantrout reads "To A Skylark" by Percy Bysshe Shelley

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In this installment, Rae Armantrout reads “To A Skylark” by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Armantrout is the author of numerous books of poetry, including The Invention of Hunger (1979), Precedence (1985), Necromance (1991), Made to Seem (1995), Pretext (2001), and Veil: New and Selected Poems (2001).  Her work has helped to shape the Language Poetry movement in contemporary verse.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, "To A Skylark"

Hail to thee, blithe spirit!
Bird thou never wert—
That from heaven or near it
Pourest thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

Higher still and higher
From the earth thou springest,
Like a cloud of fire;
The blue deep thou wingest,
And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.

In the golden light'ning
Of the sunken sun,
O'er which clouds are bright'ning,
Thou dost float and run,
Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.

The pale purple even
Melts around thy flight;
Like a star of heaven,
In the broad daylight
Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight—

Keen as are the arrows
Of that silver sphere
Whose intense lamp narrows
In the white dawn clear,
Until we hardly see, we feel that it is there.

All the earth and air
With thy voice is loud,
As when night is bare,
From one lonely cloud
The moon rains out her beams, and heaven is overflow'd.

What thou art we know not;
What is most like thee?
From rainbow clouds there flow not
Drops so bright to see,
As from thy presence showers a rain of melody:—

Like a poet hidden
In the light of thought,
Singing hymns unbidden,
Till the world is wrought
To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not:

Like a high-born maiden
In a palace tower,
Soothing her love-laden
Soul in secret hour
With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower:

Like a glow-worm golden
In a dell of dew,
Scattering unbeholden
Its aërial hue
Among the flowers and grass which screen it from the view:

Like a rose embower'd
In its own green leaves,
By warm winds deflower'd,
Till the scent it gives
Makes faint with too much sweet those heavy-wingèd thieves.

Sound of vernal showers
On the twinkling grass,
Rain-awaken'd flowers—
All that ever was
Joyous and clear and fresh—thy music doth surpass.

Teach us, sprite or bird,
What sweet thoughts are thine:
I have never heard
Praise of love or wine
That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine.

Chorus hymeneal,
Or triumphal chant,
Match'd with thine would be all
But an empty vaunt—
A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want.

What objects are the fountains
Of thy happy strain?
What fields, or waves, or mountains?
What shapes of sky or plain?
What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain?

With thy clear keen joyance
Languor cannot be:
Shadow of annoyance
Never came near thee:
Thou lovest, but ne'er knew love's sad satiety.

Waking or asleep,
Thou of death must deem
Things more true and deep
Than we mortals dream,
Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream?

We look before and after,
And pine for what is not:
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

Yet, if we could scorn
Hate and pride and fear,
If we were things born
Not to shed a tear,
I know not how thy joy we ever should come near.

Better than all measures
Of delightful sound,
Better than all treasures
That in books are found,
Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground!

Teach me half the gladness
That thy brain must know;
Such harmonious madness
From my lips would flow,
The world should listen then, as I am listening now.

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Adrian Blevins reads "Infant Sorrow" by William Blake

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In this installment, Adrian Blevins reads “Infant Sorrow” by William Blake. Blevins’s The Brass Girl Brouhaha (2003) won the 2004 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Blevins is also the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writers' Foundation Award for poetry, the Lamar York Prize for Nonfiction, and a Bright Hill Press chapbook award for The Man Who Went Out for Cigarettes (1995; 1996). Her poems and essays have appeared in The Utne Reader, The Southern Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Ontario Review, Poet Lore, The Drunken Boat, Salon.com, and other magazines and journals. New work is forthcoming in Southern Cultures, 88: A Journal of Contemporary American Poetry, Rivendell, and Poetry.

William Blake, "Infant Sorrow"

My mother groan'd! my father wept.
Into the dangerous world I leapt:
Helpless, naked, piping loud,
Like a fiend hid in a cloud.

Struggling in my father's hands,
Striving against my swaddling bands,
Bound and weary, I thought best
To sulk upon my mother's breast.

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Fanny Howe reads "No Coward Soul is Mine" by Emily Brontë

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In this installment, Fanny Howe reads “No Coward Soul is Mine” by Emily Brontë. Howe has written many novels and books of poems. They include The Deep North, Selected Poems, Economics, On the Ground, and Gone and Indivisible. She is Professor Emerita of Literature at the University of California, San Diego and the winner of the Lenore Marshall Award and of a Guggenheim. She lives in New England.

Emily Brontë, "No coward soul is mine"

No coward soul is mine,
No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere:
I see Heaven's glories shine,
And Faith shines equal, arming me from Fear.

O God within my breast,
Almighty, ever-present Deity!
Life, that in me has rest,
As I, undying Life, have power in Thee!

Vain are the thousand creeds
That move men's hearts: unutterably vain;
Worthless as withered weeds,
Or idlest froth amid the boundless main,

To waken doubt in one
Holding so fast by Thy infinity,
So surely anchored on
The steadfast rock of Immortality.

With wide-embracing love
Thy Spirit animates eternal years,
Pervades and broods above,
Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates, and rears.

Though earth and moon were gone,
And suns and universes ceased to be,
And Thou wert left alone,
Every existence would exist in Thee.

There is not room for Death,
Nor atom that his might could render void:
Since Thou art Being and Breath,
And what Thou art may never be destroyed.

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Jennifer Grotz reads "Ode to a Nightingale" by John Keats

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In this installment, Jennifer Grotz reads “Ode to a Nightingale” by John Keats. Grotz is the author of Cusp (Houghton Mifflin, 2003), winner of the Bakeless Prize for Poetry and the Natalie Ornish Prize from the Texas Institute of Letters and the letterpress chapbook Not Body (Urban Editions 2001). Her poems, reviews, and translations appear in Kenyon Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Best American Poetry. She is the newly appointed assistant director of the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and is currently completing a Ph.D. at the University of Houston where she organizes the Krakow Poetry Seminar, an international gathering to discuss the cross-pollination of American and Polish poetries.

John Keats, "Ode to a Nightingale"

1.

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness,—
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

2.

O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:

3.

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs,
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.

4.

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster’d around by all her starry Fays;
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

5.

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast fading violets cover’d up in leaves;
And mid-May’s eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

6.

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod.

7.

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

8.

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now ’tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?

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Mary Crockett Hill reads "Little Black Boy" by William Blake

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In this installment, Mary Crockett Hill reads “Little Black Boy” by William Blake. Hill is the author of the award-winning book of poems, If You Return Home with Food. Her work has appeared in numerous magazines, including Boston Review, River Styx, Pleiades, and American Poetry: The Next Generation. She is currently working on an anthology of poems by mothers and may be reached at marycrocketthill@yahoo.com.

William Blake, "Little Black Boy"

My mother bore me in the southern wild,
And I am black, but O! my soul is white;
White as an angel is the English child,
But I am black, as if bereaved of light.

My mother told me underneath a tree,
And sitting down before the heat of day,
She took me on her lap and kissed me,
And pointing to the east, began to say:

“Look on the rising sun: there God does live,
And gives His light, and gives His heat away;
And flowers and trees and beasts and men receive
Comfort in morning, joy in the noonday.

“And we are put on earth a little space,
That we may learn to bear the beams of love;
And the black bodies and this sunburnt face
Is but a cloud, and like a shady grove.

“For when our souls have learned the heat to bear,
The cloud will vanish; we shall hear His voice,
Saying: ‘Come out from the grove, my love and care,
And round my golden tent like lambs rejoice.'”

This did my mother say, and kissed me;
And thus I say to little English boy:
When I from black and he from white cloud free,
And round the tent of God like lambs we joy,

I'll shade him from the heat, till he can bear
To lean in joy upon our Father's knee;
And then I'll stand and stroke his silver hair,
And be like him, and he will then love me.

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Michelle Boisseau reads "To Autumn" by John Keats

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In this installment, Michelle Boisseau reads “To Autumn” by John Keats. Boisseau was educated at Ohio University (B.A., M.A.) and the University of Houston (Ph.D.). Her books of poetry include Trembling Air (University of Arkansas Press, 2003); Understory, winner of the Morse Prize (Northeastern University Press, 1996);and No Private Life (Vanderbilt, 1990). She is also author of the popular text Writing Poems (Longman), in its 6th edition.  Her poems have appeared in The Yale Review, Threepenny Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review, Shenandoah, Poetry, and Ploughshares. Her work has received a National Endowment for the Arts poetry fellowship and awards from the Poetry Society of America. She is a professor of English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City where she also is associate editor of BkMk Press and the coordinator of the Creative Writing program.

John Keats, "To Autumn"

1.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

2.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

3.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

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Sebastian Matthews reads "I Am" by John Clare

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In this installment, Sebastian Matthews reads “I Am” by John Clare. Matthews, a graduate of the University of Michigan's MFA program, teaches part-time at Warren Wilson College and edits Rivendell, a place-based literary journal. He is the author of the memoir, In My Father's Footsteps, and co-editor, with Stanley Plumly of Search Party: Collected Poems of William Matthews. His poems have appeared in Atlantic Monthly, New England Review, Post Road, Seneca Review, and Tin House among others. Matthews was a recent Bernard De Voto Fellow in Nonfiction.

John Clare, "I Am "

I am! yet what I am none cares or knows,
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shades in love and death's oblivion lost;
And yet I am! and live with shadows tost

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems;
And e'en the dearest—that I loved the best—
Are strange—nay, rather stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man has never trod;
A place where woman never smil'd or wept;
There to abide with my creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie;
The grass below—above the vaulted sky.

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Jonah Ruskin reads "Ah! Sun-flower" by William Blake

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In this installment, Jonah Ruskin reads “Ah! Sun-flower” by William Blake. Jonah Raskin is the author of eight books, including most recently American Scream: Allen Ginsberg's 'Howl' and the Making of the Beat Generation, which The San Francisco Chronicle named one of the best 100 books of 2004. The chair of the Communication Studies Department at Sonoma State University (SSU) and the book critic for the Santa Rosa, California, Press Democrat, he has published three poetry chapbooks, "Jonah Raskin's Greatest Hits," "More Poems, Better Poems," and "Bone Love." At SSU, he teaches media law and journalism and co-ordinates the student internship program.

William Blake, "Ah! Sun-flower"

Ah Sun-flower! weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the Sun:
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the traveller's journey is done;

Where the Youth pined away with desire,
And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow
Arise from their graves and aspire
Where my Sun-flower wishes to go.

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Alan Halsey reads "Song in the Air" by Thomas Lovell Beddoes

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In this installment, Alan Halsey reads "Song in the Air" by Thomas Lovell Beddoes. Halsey's books include The Text of Shelley's Death (1995), Wittgenstein's Devil: Selected Writing 1978-98 (2000) and Marginalien (2005). His edition of the later text of Beddoes's Death's Jest-Book was published by West House Books in 2003, and his several essays on Beddoes's life & work have appeared in various journals & pamphlets. Learn more about him here.

Thomas Lovell Beddoes, "Song in the Air"

The moon doth mock and make me crazy,
And midnight tolls her horrid claim
On ghostly homage. Fie, for shame!
Deaths, to stand painted there so lazy.
There's nothing but the stars about us,
And they're no tell-tales, but shine quiet:
Come out, and hold a midnight riot,
Where no mortal fool dare flout us:
And, as we rattle in the moonlight pale;
Wanderers shall think 'tis the nightingale.

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Ken Edwards reads "London" by William Blake

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In this installment, Ken Edwards reads “London” by William Blake. Edwards’ books include the poetry collections Intensive Care (1986), Good Science (1992), 3600 Weekends (1993), eight + six (2003), and the novel Futures (1998). He has been editor/publisher of Reality Street Editions since 1993. He is active in music as well as writing: his text for a piece by John Tilbury for piano, voice and sampled sounds, There's something in there…, was premiered in 2003, and his music for Fanny Howe's Spiral was first performed in Brighton and London in 2004. He is writing a new novel. He lives in Hastings on the south coast of England and works as an editor for the Royal College of Nursing in London.

William Blake's "London"

I wander thro' each charter'd street,
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear.

How the Chimney-sweeper's cry
Every black'ning Church appalls;
And the hapless Soldier's sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls.

But most thro' midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlot's curse
Blasts the new born Infant's tear,
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.

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