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[proximoception]

Housman's two best poems, both from Last Poems, never far from my head. 1 of 2:

Tell me not here, it needs not saying,
What tune the enchantress plays
In aftermaths of soft September
Or under blanching mays,
For she and I were long acquainted
And I know all her ways.

On russet floors, by waters idle,
The pine lets fall its cone;
The cuckoo shouts all day at nothing
In leafy dells alone;
And traveler’s joy beguiles in autumn
Hearts that have lost their own.

On acres of the seeded grasses
The changing burnish heaves;
Or marshalled under moons of harvest
Stand still all night the sheaves;
Or beeches strip in storms for winter
And stain the wind with leaves.

Possess, as I possessed a season,
The countries I resign,
Where over elmy plains the highway
Would mount the hills and shine,
And full of shade the pillared forest
Would murmur and be mine.

For nature, heartless, witless nature,
Will neither care nor know
What stranger’s feet may find the meadow
And trespass there and go,
Nor ask amid the dews of morning
If they are mine or no.

Comments

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

I'll temporarily dodge the question by saying all three, and Emerson too in prose and verse, are poets I prefer to read around in at random. I don't think I do that with anyone else. It's a rare poem by any of them I don't love.

But Frost's Directive is one of the best poems ever. I love Into My Own, Trial by Existence, Once by the Pacific, West-Running Brook for the eddy, Birches, The Peaceful Shepherd, Closing Time (feel I'm getting this title wrong), Stopping by Woods and Acquainted with the Night, the one where everyone's looking out to sea, Nothing Gold Can Stay, Two Look at Two, The Most of It. Stopping just because my memory does.

I think I remember being most cheered over the years by Long and Sluggish Lines, River of Rivers in CT, Reality Is an Activity (I think I've read those three the most often, anyway after anthology stars like Sunday Morning, Ideas of Order, 13 Ways); special to me also are Owl in the Sarcophagus, Auroras, Rabbit as King, Mrs. Alfred Uruguay, I think Dry Loaf & Girl in a Nightgown & especially Martial Cadenza in the Bush years, Landscape with Boat, Old Philosopher in Rome. I honor Ordinary Evening as his very best but it can be exhausting. A lot of great Stevens moments I can't seem to connect with his tangential titles.

Dickinson I wouldn't know where to start.