A Song: “Men of England”
BY P E R C Y B Y S S H E S H E L LE Y (1839)
Men of England, wherefore plough
For the lords who lay ye low?
Wherefore weave with toil and care
The rich robes your tyrants wear?
Wherefore feed and clothe and save
From the cradle to the grave
Those ungrateful drones who would
Drain your sweat—nay, drink your blood?
Wherefore, Bees of England, forge
Many a weapon, chain, and scourge,
That these stingless drones may spoil
The forced produce of your toil?
Have ye leisure, comfort, calm,
Shelter, food, love’s gentle balm?
Or what is it ye buy so dear
With your pain and with your fear?
The seed ye sow, another reaps;
The wealth ye find, another keeps;
The robes ye weave, another wears;
The arms ye forge, another bears.
Sow seed—but let no tyrant reap:
Find wealth—let no imposter heap:
Weave robes—let not the idle wear:
Forge arms—in your defence to bear.
Shrink to your cellars, holes, and cells—
In hall ye deck another dwells.
Why shake the chains ye wrought? Ye see
The steel ye tempered glance on ye.
With plough and spade and hoe and loom
Trace your grave and build your tomb
And weave your winding-sheet, till fair
England be your Sepulchre.
I, Too
BY LANGSTON HUGHES (1926)
I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,”
Then.
Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed—
I, too, am America.
An Elementary School Classroom in a Slum
BY STEP HEN SP ENDER
Far far from gusty waves these children's faces.
Like rootless weeds, the hair torn round their pallor:
The tall girl with her weighed-down head. The paper-
seeming boy, with rat's eyes. The stunted, unlucky heir
Of twisted bones, reciting a father's gnarled disease,
His lesson, from his desk. At back of the dim class
One unnoted, sweet and young. His eyes live in a dream
Of squirrel's game, in tree room, other than this.
On sour cream walls, donations. Shakespeare's head,
Cloudless at dawn, civilized dome riding all cities.
Belled, flowery, Tyrolese valley. Open-handed map
Awarding the world its world. And yet, for these
Children, these windows, not this map, their world,
Where all their future's painted with a fog,
A narrow street sealed in with a lead sky
Far far from rivers, capes, and stars of words.
Surely, Shakespeare is wicked, the map a bad example.
With ships and sun and love tempting them to steal —
For lives that slyly turn in their cramped holes
From fog to endless night? On their slag heap, these children
Wear skins peeped through by bones and spectacles of steel
With mended glass, like bottle bits on stones.
All of their time and space are foggy slum.
So blot their maps with slums as big as doom.
Unless, governor, inspector, visitor,
This map becomes their window and these windows
That shut upon their lives like catacombs,
Break O break open till they break the town
And show the children to green fields, and make their world
Run azure on gold sands, and let their tongues
Run naked into books the white and green leaves open
History theirs whose language is the sun.
Incident
Once riding in old Baltimore,
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee;
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me.
Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue, and called me, "Nigger."
I saw the whole of Baltimore
From May until December;
Of all the things that happened there
That's all that I remember.
Countee Cullen
Born in 1903 in New York City, Countee Cullen was raised in a Methodist
parsonage. He attended De Witt Clinton High School in New York and began writing
poetry at the age of fourteen. An imaginative lyric poet, he wrote in the tradition of
Keats and Shelley.
The Jaguar (BY TED HUGHES)
The apes yawn and adore their fleas in the sun.
The parrots shriek as if they were on fire, or strut
Like cheap tarts to attract the stroller with the nut.
Fatigued with indolence, tiger and lion
Lie still as the sun. The boa-constrictor’s coil
Is a fossil. Cage after cage seems empty, or
Stinks of sleepers from the breathing straw.
It might be painted on a nursery wall.
But who runs like the rest past these arrives
At a cage where the crowd stands, stares, mesmerized,
As a child at a dream, at a jaguar hurrying enraged
Through prison darkness after the drills of his eyes
On a short fierce fuse. Not in boredom—
The eye satisfied to be blind in fire,
By the bang of blood in the brain deaf the ear—
He spins from the bars, but there’s no cage to him
More than to the visionary his cell:
His stride is wildernesses of freedom:
The world rolls under the long thrust of his heel.
Over the cage floor the horizons come.
On Killing a Tree By Gieve Patel
It takes much time to kill a tree,
Not a simple jab of the knife
Will do it.
It has grown
Slowly consuming the earth,
Rising out if it, feeding
Upon its crust, absorbing
Years of sunlight, air, water,
And out of its leprous hide
Sprouting leaves.
So hack and chop
But this alone won’t do it.
Not so much pain will do it.
The bleeding bark will heal
And from close to the ground
Will rise curled green twigs,
Miniature boughs
Which if unchecked will expand again
To former size.
No,
The root is to be pulled out
Out of the anchoring earth;
It is to be roped, tied,
And pulled out-snapped out
Or pulled out entirely,
Out from the earth-cave,
And the strength of the tree exposed,
The source, white and wet,
The most sensitive, hidden
For years inside the earth.
Then the matter
Of scorching and choking
In sun and air,
Browning, hardening,
Twisting, withering,
And then it is done.
Of Mothers, among other things
(BY A.K. RAMANUJAN)
I smell upon this twisted blackbone tree
the silk and whitepetal of my mother’s youth.
From her earrings three diamonds
splash a handful of needles,
and I see my mother run back
from rain to the crying cradles.
The rains tack and sew
with broken threads the rags
of the tree tasseled light.
But her hands are a wet eagle’s
two black-pink crinkled feet,
one talon crippled in a garden-
trap set for a mouse. Her saris
do not cling: they hang, loose
feather of a one time wing.
My cold parchment tongue licks bark
in the mouth when I see her four
still sensible fingers slowly flex
to pick a grain of rice from the kitchen floor.
LONDON ( BY WILLIAM BLAKE )
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.
1794 LONDON (From Songs of Experience):
Blake, William (1757-1827) - English poet, engraver, and mystic who illustrated his own works. A rare
genius, he created some of the purest lyrics in the English language. Blake believed himself to be
guided by visions from the spiritual world; he died singing of the glories of heaven. London (1794) -
Contains Blake’s famous reference to “the mind-forged manacles.” Opening lines: I wander through
each charter’d street, / Near where the charter’d Thames does flow ...
Sonnet 130 (William Shakespeare)
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun,
Coral is far more red, than her lips red,
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun:
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head:
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks,
And in some perfumes is there more delight,
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know,
That music hath a far more pleasing sound:
I grant I never saw a goddess go,
My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.
And yet by heaven I think my love as rare,
As any she belied with false compare.
The Sun Rising (BY JOHN DONNE)
Busy old fool, unruly sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run?
Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
Late school boys and sour prentices,
Go tell court huntsmen that the king will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices,
Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.
Thy beams, so reverend and strong
Why shouldst thou think?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long;
If her eyes have not blinded thine,
Look, and tomorrow late, tell me,
Whether both th' Indias of spice and mine
Be where thou leftst them, or lie here with me.
Ask for those kings whom thou saw'st yesterday,
And thou shalt hear, All here in one bed lay.
She's all states, and all princes, I,
Nothing else is.
Princes do but play us; compared to this,
All honor's mimic, all wealth alchemy.
Thou, sun, art half as happy as we,
In that the world's contracted thus.
Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that's done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;
This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere.
Stanza one begins with the speaker in bed with his lover, complaining about its beaming
rays. Donne uses expressions such as, "Busy old fool" (line 1) and "Saucy Pedantic Wretch"
[perfectionist][3] (line 5) to describe his annoyance with it. The speaker of the poem questions
the sun's motives and yearns for the sun to go away so that he and his lover can stay in bed.
Donne is tapping into human emotion in personifying the sun, and he is exhibiting how
beings behave when they are in love with one another. The speaker in the poem believes
that, for him and his lover, time is the enemy. He asks, "Must to thy motions lovers' seasons
run?" (line 4)[1] or, in other words, 'why must lovers be controlled by the sun?'. The speaker
then tells the sun to bother someone else, "go chide late schoolboys and sour prentices, Go
tell court huntsmen that the king will ride..." (lines 5-7), and that love knows no season,
climate, hour, day, nor month.
In Stanza two, the speaker is saying how the sun believes its beams are strong but he could
"eclipse" and "cloud them in a wink" (line 13). Although he can shield his eyes from the sun,
he does not want to do that because it means he would be also shielding his eyes from his
lover. He says, "But that I would not lose her sight so long" (line 14). The speaker proceeds
to reprimand the sun and tells it to set, come back the next day, and tell him "whether both
th' Indias of spice and mine be where thou lefst them, or lie here with me" (lines 16-18).[1] He
wants the sun to tell him if all the kings, queens, riches and gold of the world are still out
there or lying in bed next to him. Towards the end of the stanza the speaker confirms, "Ask
for those kings whom thou saw'st yesterday, and thou shalt hear, All here in one bed lay"
(lines 19-20), that his lover is above all kings and beside him in bed are all the riches and
gold that he could ever want.
Within the last stanza the speaker attempts to settle his anger in praising his lover. His lover
is his world and when they are in bed together they are in their own microcosm of bliss.
Stating that nothing else is half as important as his lover, the speaker insists "Thine age asks
ease, and since thy duties be to warm the world, that's done in warming us. Shine here to
us, and thou art everywhere; this bed thy center is, these walls thy sphere" (lines 27-30).
Which translates to his worrying about the sun's age and implying that all a sun is good for is
warming up the world and its lovers, once it does that then its job is done. His lover is his
whole world, and since the sun is shining on the bed composed of these two, then it is also
shining on the entire world.
