Poetry

When I was young we had the big book The Golden Treasury of Poetry, illustrated by Joan Walsh Anglund, who did several children's books. (I think we still have it around somewhere.) It included a wide range of poems, including story poems like Oliver Wendell Holmes' "Grandmother's Story of Bunker Hill Battle" and Elizabeth Bishop's "The Fish."

One of my favorite poets is the well-named Robert Frost. Another is William Butler Yeats. I like poems that are short enough to memorize, like Frost's "Dust of Snow":

The way a crow shook down on me

A dust of snow from a hemlock tree

Has given my heart a change of mood

And saved some part of a day I had rued.

Or his "Nothing Gold Can Stay":

Nature's first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf's a flower

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief.

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

I haven't written much poetry at all, but I am interested in translating poems (the hardest form of translation, of course). I recently got the notion to translate some of Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology poems into Scots dialect, like Robert Burns' poems. And one project that I've started is translating Luis Vaz de Camoes' epic Portuguese poem The Lusiades into English:  I'm about halfway through the first canto.

Some poems mean a lot to me. Like W.H. Auden's "September 1st, 1939" ("I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn:  Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return"), Langston Hughes' "Mother to Son" ("Life for me ain't been no crystal stair"), Yeats' "Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven," Whittier's "Barbara Freitchie," Walt Whitman's "There Was a Child Went Forth Each Day." I could go on and on...