Daffodils
By William Wordsworth – 1770-1850

I wandered lonely as a Cloud
That floats on high o’er Vales and Hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host of golden Daffodils;
Beside the Lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the Milky Way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced, but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:—
A Poet could not but be gay
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the shew to me had brought:

For oft when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude,
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the Daffodils.

About the Poet

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) wrote beautiful poetry filled with sweet imagery, usually based around the natural world. Often Wordsworth’s poems contained slight somber undertones, as is the case in this poem, as we will explore shortly. This is possible due to the conflict In Wordsworth’s life and his battle with depression. Some scholars suggest that Wordsworth’s relationship with his sister, Dorothy was far from platonic. But Wordsworth did marry and lived with both his wife and sister.

Wordsworth lived through the French Revolution, which he initially supported and later rebuked. William Wordsworth, who rallied for “common speech” within poems and argued against the poetic biases of the period, wrote some of the most influential poetry in Western literature, including his most famous work, The Prelude, which is often considered to be the crowning achievement of English romanticism. He and his close friend and fellow poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge were the pioneers of the romantic era of poetry, and Wordsworth’s earlier romantic poems were widely derided because of this. He was also the poet laureate for queen Victoria for seven years. Today, Wordsworth’s reputation rests heavily on the collection Lyrical Ballads that he published along with Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1798. 

About the Poem

“Daffodils” or “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” is one of the best-loved poems of the romantic poetry of William Wordsworth. The poem features how the spontaneous emotions of the poet’s heart sparked by the energetic dance of daffodils help him pen down this sweet little piece. On April 15, 1802, Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy came across a host of daffodils around Glencoyne Bay in the Lake District of Northern England. (The falls and surrounding area of Gowbarrow Park is the area of Glencoyne Bay known as Wordsworth Point.) This event was the inspiration behind the composition of Wordsworth’s lyric poem. “Daffodils” has been dissected methodically for illustrating the poet’s mood, the surrounding location, the allegorical meanings, and the beauty of nature in full motion. The poet’s love and proximity with nature have inspired and moved generations after generations of poetry lovers and young minds.

The speaker, likely Wordsworth himself, is wandering down the hills and valley when he stumbled upon a beautiful field of daffodils. Though the poem’s title hints at a cloud, it is not about it. Instead, it is about a group of golden daffodils dancing beside the lake and beneath the trees. The speaker is transfixed by the daffodils seemingly waving, fluttering, and dancing along the waterside. The poet feels immensely gleeful at this mesmerizing natural sight. Amongst the company of flowers, he remains transfixed at those daffodils wavering with full vigor. Oblivious to the poet is the fact that this wondrous scenery of daffodils brings the poet immense joy when he’s in a tense mood or perplexed for that matter. His heart breaths a new life and gives him exponential happiness at sight worth a thousand words.

The poem begins with a symbolic reference to the cloud. It is wandering and lonely. The poetic persona is the embodiment of such a cloud. Hence, it symbolizes being lonely and thoughtless. This state is achieved when one is free from mundane thoughts. The most important symbol of this piece is the daffodils. The narcissistic description of the flower seems to be alluding to the Greek myth. Apart from that, the daffodil acts as a symbol of rejuvenation and pure joy. Wordsworth becomes the means through which the flowers express their vibrance. In his pensive mood, they become a means for the poet’s self-reflection.

Hailed as the champion of the Romantic Movement in the early 19th century, Wordsworth dwelled in scenic Lake District of Northern England, far from the madding crowd. Its roots can be traced back to Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal, in which she reminisces a casual stroll with his brother in 1802, where they came across beautiful daffodils. Dorothy wrote in her journal:
 

When we were in the woods beyond Gowbarrow Park, we saw a few daffodils close to the water side. We fancied that the lake had floated the seed ashore and that the little colony had so sprung up. But as we went along there were more and more and at last under the boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road.
 
I never saw daffodils so beautiful they grew among the mossy stones about and about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness and the rest tossed and reeled and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the lake, they looked so gay ever dancing ever changing.
 
This wind blew directly over the lake to them. There was here and there a little knot and a few stragglers a few yards higher up, but they were so few as not to disturb the simplicity and unity and life of that one busy highway. We rested again and again. The Bays were stormy, and we heard the waves at different distances and in the middle of the water like the sea.

The poem was composed within the period of 1804-1807 and subsequently published in 1807, with a revised version published in 1815. The poem is considered a masterpiece of Romantic Era poetry steeped in natural imagery. As the sister’s journal recalls, the daffodils seemed immensely beautiful from a far-off view. 

One Hundred Love Sonnets: XVII (I don’t love you as if you were a rose)
By Pablo Neruda – 1904-1973

I don’t love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz,
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as one loves certain obscure things,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom but carries
the light of those flowers, hidden, within itself,
and thanks to your love the tight aroma that arose
from the earth lives dimly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you directly without problems or pride:
I love you like this because I don’t know any other way to love,
except in this form in which I am not nor are you,
so close that your hand upon my chest is mine,
so close that your eyes close with my dreams.

Cien Sonetos de Amor: XVII (No te amo como si fueras rosa)

No te amo como si fueras rosa de sal, topacio
o flecha de claveles que propagan el fuego:
te amo como se aman ciertas cosas oscuras,
secretamente, entre la sombra y el alma.

Te amo como la planta que no florece y lleva
dentro de sí, escondida, la luz de aquellas flores,
y gracias a tu amor vive oscuro en mi cuerpo
el apretado aroma que ascendió de la tierra.

Te amo sin saber como, ni cuándo, ni de dónde,
Te amo directamente sin problemas ni orgullo:
así te amo porque no sé amar de otra manera,
sino así de este modo en que no soy ni eres,
tan cerca que tu mano sobre mi pecho es mía,
tan cerca que se cierran tus ojos con mi sueño.

Born Ricardo Eliecer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto in the town of Parral in southern Chile on July 12, 1904, Pablo Neruda led a life charged with poetic and political activity. In 1923, he sold all of his possessions to finance the publication of his first book, Crepusculario (“Twilight”). He published the volume under the pseudonym “Pablo Neruda” to avoid conflict with his family, who disapproved of his occupation. The following year, he found a publisher for Veinte poemas de amor y una cancion desesperada (“Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair”). The book made a celebrity of Neruda, who gave up his studies at the age of twenty to devote himself to his craft.

In 1927, Neruda began his long career as a diplomat in the Latin American tradition of honoring poets with diplomatic assignments. After serving as honorary consul in Burma, Neruda was named Chilean consul in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1933. While there, he began a friendship with the visiting Spanish poet Federico García Lorca. After transferring to Madrid later that year, Neruda also met Spanish writer Manuel Altolaguirre. Together, the two men founded a literary review called Caballo verde para la poesîa in 1935. The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 interrupted Neruda’s poetic and political development. He chronicled the horrendous years which included the execution of García Lorca in Espana en el corazon (1937), published from the war front. Neruda’s outspoken sympathy for the loyalist cause during the Spanish Civil War led to his recall from Madrid in 1937. He then moved to Paris and helped settle Spanish republican refugees in Chile.

Neruda returned to Chile in 1938 where he renewed his political activity and wrote prolifically. Named Chilean Consul to Mexico in 1939, Neruda left Chile again for four years. Upon returning to Chile in 1943, he was elected to the Senate and joined the Communist Party. When the Chilean government moved to the right, they declared communism illegal and expelled Neruda from the Senate. He went into hiding. During those years he wrote and published Canto general (1950).

In 1952 the government withdrew the order to arrest leftist writers and political figures, and Neruda returned to Chile and married Matilde Urrutia, his third wife (his first two marriages, to Maria Antonieta Haagenar Vogelzang and Delia del Carril, both ended in divorce). For the next twenty-one years, he continued a career that integrated private and public concerns and became known as the people’s poet. 

In 1960, Neruda wrote 100 Love Sonnets. Sonnet XVII is the most famous of these sonnets. Neruda wrote these sonnets to his third wife, Matilde Urrutia, with whom he had an affair during his second marriage. The nature of their love, which was hidden for so long, seeps through in Sonnet XVII’s lines about darkness, secrets, shadows. The collection itself begins with a beautiful dedication to Matilde, which reads, in part: “I built up these lumber piles of love, and with fourteen boards each I built little houses, so that your eyes, which I adore and sing to, might live in them.”

There are so many poems in this collection that feel vitally important and true; poems that express hunger, desire, desperation, or a profound sense of loneliness even in the deepest and most intense feelings of love. (From Sonnet XI: “I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair / Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.”) But Sonnet XVII expresses a feeling at once unbearably sweet and possibly codependent. So many of us have this tendency—to try and squish ourselves so close to another person that we can no longer remember where the seams are:

I love you like this because I don’t know any other way to love,
except in this form in which I am not nor are you,
so close that your hand upon my chest is mine,
so close that your eyes close with my dreams.

During this time, Neruda received numerous prestigious awards, including the International Peace Prize in 1950, the Lenin Peace Prize and the Stalin Peace Prize in 1953, and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. He was diagnosed with cancer while serving a two-year term as ambassador to France. Neruda resigned his position, ending his diplomatic career. On September 23, 1973, just twelve days after the defeat of Chile’s democratic regime, the man widely regarded as the greatest Latin American poet since Darío died in Santiago, Chile.

The Rhodora
By Ralph Waldo Emerson – 1803-1882

In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes,

I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods,

Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook,

To please the desert and the sluggish brook.

The purple petals fallen in the pool

Made the black water with their beauty gay;

Here might the red-bird come his plumes to cool,

And court the flower that cheapens his array.

Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why

This charm is wasted on the earth and sky,

Tell them, dear, that, if eyes were made for seeing,

Then beauty is its own excuse for Being;

Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose!

I never thought to ask; I never knew;

But in my simple ignorance suppose

The self-same power that brought me there, brought you.

About the Poem

The official name of the poem is “The Rhodora, On Being Asked, Whence Is the Flower”, and was written by Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1834. Emerson uniquely describes a wonderful and insightful spiritual connection with nature in a primitive, deified manner. The focus of the poem is to showcase to Emerson’s audience that a person has the embedded ability to share and experience a kindred relationship with God through the beauty of Nature.

The Rhodora is presented as a flower as beautiful as the rose, but the Rhodora can be described as a scrawny deciduous shrub. In the poem, it is described as remaining humble and not seeking broader fame. The narrator of the poem is outside during springtime in New England and has found a beautiful Rhodora, “Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook,” and is reflecting on the ability to bring beauty to such a dismal location and setting.

“The Rhodora” described the love of his life, probably his life. Emerson disliked the ordinary and the status quo. Therefore, roses are nit his cup of tea. Everyone loves roses, so he wanted a more unique ay to describe his love. When it came to describing his wife, the Rhodora plant encompassed all that he felt of her, including the lavender petals. Emerson describes his wife as stunningly beautiful through his eyes, and similar to items of immense value, she is hard to find. He gives her a grand compliment as a writer that she has a calming influence on his life and points out that she is only known by a certain few, those who seek out her uniqueness, her beauty, and her calming influence. She must have been a remarkable woman.

About the Poet

An American essayist, poet, and popular philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) began his career as a Unitarian minister in Boston, but achieved worldwide fame as a lecturer and the author of such essays as “Self-Reliance,” “History,” “The Over-Soul,” and “Fate.” Drawing on English and German Romanticism, Neoplatonism, Kantianism, and Hinduism, Emerson developed a metaphysics of process, an epistemology of moods, and an “existentialist” ethics of self-improvement. He influenced generations of Americans, from his friend Henry David Thoreau to John Dewey, and in Europe, Friedrich Nietzsche, who takes up such Emersonian themes as power, fate, the uses of poetry and history, and the critique of Christianity.

“There are many unspeakable words, forgotten, or forbidden. Great thanks to the poets who make them all become reachable.”

—Toba Beta

For One Who Gayly Sowed His Oats
By Countee Cullen – 1903-1946

My days were a thing for me to live,
For others to deplore;
I took of life all it could give:
Rind, inner fruit, and core.

Spring Reminiscence
By Countee Cullen – 1903-1946

“My sweet,” you sang, and, “Sweet,” I sang,
And sweet we sang together,
Glad to be young as the world was young,
Two colts too strong for a tether.

Shall ever a spring be like that spring,
Or apple blossoms as white;
Or ever clover smell like the clover
We lay upon that night?

Shall ever your hand lie in my hand,
Pulsing to it, I wonder;
Or have the gods, being jealous gods,
Envied us our thunder?

If You Should Go
By Countee Cullen – 1903-1946

Love, leave me like the light,
The gently passing day;
We would not know, but for the night,
When it has slipped away.

So many hopes have fled,
Have left me but the name
Of what they were. When love is dead,
Go thou, beloved, the same.

Go quietly; a dream
When done, should leave no trace
That it has lived, except a gleam
Across the dreamer’s face.

About Countee Cullen
Born on May 30, 1903, in New York City, Countee Cullen was one of the most important voices of the Harlem Renaissance.

American writer Alain Locke helped Cullen come to terms with his sexuality. Locke wanted to introduce a new generation of African-American writers, such as Countee Cullen, to the reading public. Locke also sought to present the authentic natures of sex and sexuality through writing, creating a kind of relationship with those who felt the same. Locke introduced Cullen to gay-affirming material, such as the work of Edward Carpenter, at a time when most gays were in the closet. In March 1923, Cullen wrote to Locke about Carpenter’s work: “It opened up for me soul windows which had been closed; it threw a noble and evident light on what I had begun to believe, because of what the world believes, ignoble and unnatural.”

Critics and historians have not reached consensus as to Cullen’s sexuality, partly because Cullen was unsure of this himself. Cullen’s first marriage, to Yolande Du Bois, experienced difficulties before ending in divorce. He subsequently had relationships with many different men, although each ended poorly. Each relationship had a sense of shame or secrecy, such as his relationship with Edward Atkinson. Cullen later married Ida Robertson while potentially in a relationship with Atkinson. Letters between Cullen and Atkinson suggest a romantic interest, although there is no concrete evidence that they were in a sexual relationship.

For the Bird Singing before Dawn
By Kim Stafford

Some people presume to be hopeful
when there is no evidence for hope,
to be happy when there is no cause.
Let me say now, I’m with them.

In deep darkness on a cold twig
in a dangerous world, one first
little fluff lets out a peep, a warble,
a song—and in a little while, behold:

the first glimmer comes, then a glow
filters through the misty trees,
then the bold sun rises, then
everyone starts bustling about.

And that first crazy optimist, can we
forgive her for thinking, dawn by dawn,
“Hey, I made that happen!
And oh, life is so fine.”

About This Poem

“Many times in my life I’ve been told by serious people that I must be very naïve to be happy, to have hope, to celebrate this little life I’ve been given when, actually, they say, everything is pretty dire. There’s war, poverty, crushing injustice all over—what right do I have to talk back to all that with flimsy little poems about the good? What can I say? The birds are my teachers, my elders, my guides. Every day before dawn, in silence and darkness, I’m at my desk making poems on the page. And then, before light, I hear the first bird outside begin to sing.”

—Kim Stafford

Love Returned
By Bayard Taylor

He was a boy when first we met;
  His eyes were mixed of dew and fire,
And on his candid brow was set
  The sweetness of a chaste desire:
But in his veins the pulses beat
  Of passion, waiting for its wing,
As ardent veins of summer heat
  Throb through the innocence of spring.

As manhood came, his stature grew,
  And fiercer burned his restless eyes,
Until I trembled, as he drew
  From wedded hearts their young disguise.
Like wind-fed flame his ardor rose,
  And brought, like flame, a stormy rain:
In tumult, sweeter than repose,
  He tossed the souls of joy and pain.

So many years of absence change!
  I knew him not when he returned:
His step was slow, his brow was strange,
  His quiet eye no longer burned.
When at my heart I heard his knock,
  No voice within his right confessed:
I could not venture to unlock
  Its chambers to an alien guest.

Then, at the threshold, spent and worn
  With fruitless travel, down he lay:
And I beheld the gleams of morn
  On his reviving beauty play.
I knelt, and kissed his holy lips,
  I washed his feet with pious care;
And from my life the long eclipse
  Drew off; and left his sunshine there.

He burns no more with youthful fire;
  He melts no more in foolish tears;
Serene and sweet, his eyes inspire
  The steady faith of balanced years.
His folded wings no longer thrill,
  But in some peaceful flight of prayer:
He nestles in my heart so still,
  I scarcely feel his presence there.

O Love, that stern probation o’er,
  Thy calmer blessing is secure!
Thy beauteous feet shall stray no more,
  Thy peace and patience shall endure!
The lightest wind deflowers the rose,
  The rainbow with the sun departs,
But thou art centred in repose,
  And rooted in my heart of hearts!

Bayard Taylor (1825-1878) was an American poet, novelist, travel writer, literary critic, diplomat, lecturer, and translator. He was a frustrated poet who, even though he published twenty volumes of poetry, resented the mass appeal of his travel writings, because his desire was to be known as a poet. Even his travel writings have been relegated to the dustbin of literary history, and he is known today solely for his translation of both volumes of Goethe’s Faust.

Bayard was born on the January 11, 1825, in the small town of Kennett Square, Pennsylvania into a Quaker family. His parents were reasonably well-off farmers and could afford to give their son a decent education at academies in West Chester and Unionville. Although he entered the printing business as an apprentice, he was a keen writer of poetry and took great inspiration from the influential Rufus Wilmot Griswold. Encouraged by Griswold he published his first volume of poems at the age of 19 and called it Ximena, or the Battle of the Sierra Morena and other Poems. It sold badly but was noticed by the editor of the New York Tribune.

He worked as a journalist on the New York Tribune and other publications and this profession turned out to be his gateway to extensive worldwide travel when sent on assignments abroad. He even turned his hand to lyric writing for famous singers and completed a period of diplomatic service in St Petersburg, Russia.

He was lucky that his first commission was a European trip covering Germany, Italy, France, and England. He spent two years happily travelling at a slow pace, sending reports back to the Tribune. He was also engaged by other publications such as The Saturday Evening Post and The United States Gazette. On his return to the States, he was encouraged to publish his first travel book, based on his recent adventures. Views Afoot, or Europe seen with Knapsack and Staff was published in New York in two separate volumes in 1846. Further assignments followed but this time within the United States and Mexico. Taylor was now comfortably established in both journalism and as an author. He also had some success with a set of lyrics written for a visiting Swedish singer called Jenny Lind which were sung at concerts around the country. Within a few years he was off again on his travels, this time to Egypt and other countries in the Middle East. 

In 1853, Taylor started from England and sailed to India, China, and then Japan. He was back in the States at the end of 1853 and then began a successful lecture tour. Two more years passed before the next overseas trip and this time he chose the countries of Northern Europe such as Sweden. Here he was inspired to write a long poem in narrative form called Lars.

Incredibly he found the time to serve as a diplomat and was appointed chargé d’affaires at the United States embassy in St Petersburg in 1863, accompanied by his second wife Maria. The following year they were back home at Kennett Square and Taylor wrote four novels with limited success. Poetry was his forte.

Taylor confided to Walt Whitman that he found in his own nature “a physical attraction and tender and noble love of man for man.” Taylor’s novel Joseph and His Friend: A Story of Pennsylvania (1870), which depicted men holding hands and kissing, is considered the first American gay novel by modern scholars. It presented a special attachment between two men and discussed the nature and significance of such a relationship, romantic but not sexual. Critics are divided in interpreting Taylor’s novel as a political argument for gay relationships or an idealization of male spirituality. This novel is said to be based on the romantic relationship between poets Fitz-Greene Halleck and Joseph Rodman Drake. In Keith Stern’s Queers in History, it is revealed that the love of Taylor’s life was George Henry Boker, although both men married women. The American banker, diplomat, and poet George Boker wrote to Taylor in 1856 that he had “never loved anything human as I love you. It is a joy and a pride to my heart to know that this feeling is returned.” 

His travelling days were not finished, and he was appointed to another diplomatic post, this time in Berlin. Unfortunately, he died only a few months after arriving in the German capital. Bayard Taylor died in Berlin on the December 19, 1878, at aged 53.

Hatred
By Wisława Szymborska

See how efficient it still is,
how it keeps itself in shape—
our century’s hatred.
How easily it vaults the tallest obstacles.
How rapidly it pounces, tracks us down.

It’s not like other feelings.
At once both older and younger.
It gives birth itself to the reasons
that give it life.
When it sleeps, it’s never eternal rest.
And sleeplessness won’t sap its strength; it feeds it.

One religion or another –
whatever gets it ready, in position.
One fatherland or another –
whatever helps it get a running start.
Justice also works well at the outset
until hate gets its own momentum going.
Hatred. Hatred.
Its face twisted in a grimace
of erotic ecstasy…

Hatred is a master of contrast-
between explosions and dead quiet,
red blood and white snow.
Above all, it never tires
of its leitmotif – the impeccable executioner
towering over its soiled victim.

It’s always ready for new challenges.
If it has to wait awhile, it will.
They say it’s blind. Blind?
It has a sniper’s keen sight
and gazes unflinchingly at the future
as only it can.

It is not an easy thing, to live under a cruel and unjust system of rule. To constantly be on guard, to watch every word you say, to always be afraid, to know that a single mistake could cost you your very life. This is how I felt when I lived in Alabama, especially when I was teaching school. One wrong word, a gesture, the way I walked, and many other things I had to guard against for fear of losing my job because someone found out I was gay. Had they ever found out, I know I would have lost my job within a week, if not within a day. I grew up in rural Alabama where homophobia and racism were very strong. There are areas of Alabama that aren’t as conservative, but much of the state is. It is a state filled with hate and hateful people. However, there are some wonderful and loving people in the state as well.

Wislawa Szymborska was born on July 2, 1923, in Bnin, a small town in Western Poland. Her family moved to Krakow in 1931 where she lived most of her life. She was forced to face a different type of hatred, not once, but twice in her life. Szymborska was unfortunate enough to have lived through both Hitler’s reign of terror and Communist rule. She seems to have been greatly affected by these experiences, as can be seen through her poetry, which frequently deals with such topics as death, loss of self, and war. An excellent example of a poem that tangles with these topics would be “Hatred,” first published in her 1993 book The End and the Beginning.

In “Hatred,” Szymborska looks at the circular nature of hatred, grimly observing that “It gives birth itself to the reasons that give it life.” She then further reinforces this statement by describing these reasons in greater detail, justice and religion and a macabre pleasure-each one guiding the heart toward thoughts of bloodshed and ruin. In the poem, Szymborska writes, “Only hatred has just what it takes.” Only hatred has such a talent for destruction.

This is perhaps, rendered more understandable by the sheer devastation that she describes the fury and hate of war as causing, the endless slaughter and torment. Every word fairly drips with harsh sarcasm as she speaks of the “Magnificent bursting bombs” and “splendid fire-glow.” Perhaps most chilling is the poem’s complete lack of hope for a better future. There are no last minute words of comfort. War remains coldly merciless, for how could it not? It is the tool of hatred, which has “a sniper’s keen sight, and gazes unflinchingly into the future.”

Szymborska studied Polish literature and sociology at Jagellonian University from 1945 until 1948. While attending the university, she became involved in Krakow’s literary scene and first met and was influenced by Czeslaw Milosz. She began work at the literary review magazine Życie Literackie (Literary Life) in 1953, a job she held for nearly thirty years.

While the Polish history from World War II through Stalinism clearly informs her poetry, Szymborska was also a deeply personal poet who explored the large truths that exist in ordinary, everyday things. “Of course, life crosses politics,” Szymborska once said “but my poems are strictly not political. They are more about people and life.”

Well-known in her native Poland, Wisława Szymborska received international recognition when she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996. In awarding the prize, the Academy praised her “poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality.” Collections of her poems that have been translated into English include People on a Bridge (1990), View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems (1995), Miracle Fair (2001), and Monologue of a Dog (2005).

Readers of Szymborska’s poetry have often noted its wit, irony, and deceptive simplicity. Her poetry examines domestic details and occasions, playing these against the backdrop of history. In the poem “The End and the Beginning,” Szymborska writes, “After every war / someone’s got to tidy up.” Wislawa Szymborska died on February 1, 2012, at the age of eighty-eight.

Thank you, Susan, for suggesting this thought-provoking poem.

The Dark Night (XVIII)
By May Sinclair – 1863-1946

Our love is woven
Of a thousand strands—
The cool fragrance of the first lilac
At morning,
The first dew on the grass,
The smell of wild mint in the wood,
The pungent and earthy smell of ground ivy crushed under our feet;
Songs of birds, songs of great poets;
The leaping of the red squirrel in the tree,
The running of the river,
The commotion of stars and clouds in the high winds at night;
And dark stillness.
It is adorned with all the flowers
That stand in our garden;
It holds the night and the day.

Our love is made
Of the South Wind and the West Wind,
And the soft falling of rain;
Of white April evenings;
It is made of trees,
And of the many-coloured fields on the hills;
Of horizons,
Dark sea-blue of the west, thin sky-blue of the east,
With a yellow road between.
The flames of sunset and sunrise
Mingle in the fire of our love.

May Sinclair, born Mary Amelia St. Clair on August 24, 1863, in Rock Ferry, Cheshire, England, was a novelist, short story writer, poet, critic, and suffragist. She was the author of many books, including The Combined Maze (Harper and Brothers, 1913), The Life and Death of Harriett Frean (The Macmillan Company, 1922),and Uncanny Stories (The Macmillan Company, 1923), a collection of ghost stories. She died on November 14, 1946.

At the Spring Dawn
By Angelina Weld Grimké

I watched the dawn come,
Watched the spring dawn come.
And the red sun shouldered his way up
Through the grey, through the blue,
Through the lilac mists.
The quiet of it! The goodness of it!
And one bird awoke, sang, whirred
A blur of moving black against the sun,
Sang again—afar off.
And I stretched my arms to the redness of the sun,
Stretched to my finger tips,
And I laughed.
Ah! It is good to be alive, good to love,
At the dawn,
At the spring dawn.

Angelina Weld Grimké, born in Boston, on February 27, 1880, was a journalist, playwright, and poet from the Harlem Renaissance. Her work was collected in several Harlem Renaissance anthologies, including Negro Poets and Their Poems (The Associated Publishers, 1923) and The New Negro (Atheneum, 1925). She died on June 10, 1958.