The Second Book of Modern Verse: A Selection from the Work of Contemporaneous American Poets
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The Second Book of Modern Verse: A Selection from the Work of Contemporaneous American Poets
American poetry -- 20th century
The Wide Door into Sorrow
Stands open night and day.
With head held high and dancing feet
I pass it on my way.
I never tread within it,
I never turn to see
The Wide Door into Sorrow.
It cannot frighten me.
The Narrow Doors to Sorrow
Are secret, still, and low:
Swift tongues of dusk that spoil the sun
Before I even know.
My dancing feet are frozen.
I stare. I can but see.
The Narrow Doors to Sorrow
They stop the heart in me.
-- Oh, stranger than my midnights
Of loneliness and strife
The Doors that let the dark leap in
Across my sunny life!
"I Pass a Lighted Window". [Clement Wood]
I pass a lighted window
And a closed door --
And I am not troubled
Any more.
Though the road is murky,
I am not afraid,
For a shadow passes
On the lighted shade.
Once I knew the sesame
To the closed door;
Now I shall not enter
Any more;
Nor will people passing
By the lit place,
See our shadows marry
In a gray embrace.
Strange a passing shadow
Has a long spell!
What can matter, knowing
She does well?
How can life annoy me
Any more?
Life: a lighted window
And a closed door.
Doors. [Hermann Hagedorn]
Like a young child who to his mother's door
Runs eager for the welcoming embrace,
And finds the door shut, and with troubled face
Calls and through sobbing calls, and o'er and o'er
Calling, storms at the panel -- so before
A door that will not open, sick and numb,
I listen for a word that will not come,
And know, at last, I may not enter more.
Silence! And through the silence and the dark
By that closed door, the distant sob of tears
Beats on my spirit, as on fairy shores
The spectral sea; and through the sobbing -- hark!
Down the fair-chambered corridor of years,
The quiet shutting, one by one, of doors.
Where Love once was. [James Oppenheim]
Where love once was, let there be no hate:
Though they that went as one by night and day
Go now alone,
Where love once was, let there be no hate.
The seeds we planted together
Came to rich harvest,
And our hearts are as bins brimming with the golden plenty:
Into our loneliness we carry granaries of old love . . .
And though the time has come when we cannot sow our acres together,
And our souls need diverse fields,
And a tilling apart,
Let us go separate ways with a blessing each for each,
And gentle parting,
And let there be no hate,
Where love once was.
Irish Love Song. [Margaret Widdemer]
Well, if the thing is over, better it is for me,
The lad was ever a rover, loving and laughing free,
Far too clever a lover not to be having still
A lass in the town and a lass by the road and a lass by the farther hill --
Love on the field and love on the path and love in the woody glen --
(Lad, will I never see you, never your face again?)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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