As for me, I do not trust the familiar:

I demand miracles and signs (and they are wrought for me!)

and wonders that run in the air and wheel in space

after the imagination's design.

The lion and the leopard pace toward me

whenever I call, and the beating of wings

sends astonishment through the empty air, and from the clay

his vine springs up, unwatered,

and a golden gourd goes climbing.

I have breathed in the impossible,

and it swaggered, and hung for me from the stars

its carnival chains of light.

And a train to Mars sets out from here.

There I shall meet you, my love,

or at the burning bush in Harvard Yard.

This Beast, This Angel

No, my love: this is not you, nor is it I.

This is a monster or an angel, a form ever turning,

this is the will, our whip and our food.

The fangs of gold are drawn from their sheath, a long

angelic sword is drawn; both await the cry at

midnight,

in answer to a word stammered out.

Under this gaze our powers meet, made one;

and the eyes meet in the curves of the nights.

Behold the transformation that comes to pass

where mortal powers slay mortality,

and to the whole of its dreadful height rises

this monster, this angel, you and I.

Adrienne Rich

proportion in her lines, her style, her poetic breath, and the wedding of all these to the subject she treats; he praised too the modesty he found in her poems, which, as he said, is rarely to be found in the poems of her generation; and he closed his essay by saying: “Poems are like people. The poems that will cross the reader's path in this book are elegantly but simply dressed; they speak to you quietly but do not stammer; they respect their elders but are not terrified of them; and they never invent lies. And that, in a first fruit — by my truth — is a great deal.”

Since the publication of her first book a number of new pieces have gathered to her, which she intends to publish once she has done with a long narrative poem, most of whose events take place in the imaginations of the story's characters and their memories rather than in reality. I will not conceal that I feared the reins might slip from the hand of our poet, accustomed as she is to composing short pieces, when she undertook the poem of long breath; but the portions of it I was shown proved my fear out of place. She now publishes her poems from time to time in the well-known magazines such as the “Atlantic” and “Harper's,” and in the purely literary magazines called here “the little magazines,” their readers being confined to the chosen few, such as “Poetry,” “Beloit,” the “Virginia Quarterly Review,” and others.

Although Adrienne finished her studies last year, she still lives in Cambridge, which has charmed her with the beauty of its views and its matchless cultural air; she holds that the culture she now acquires outside the classroom is no less than that which is gathered within it.

Rarely will you find a poet, writer, or thinker in this city or its neighborhood whom Adrienne does not know, and I have no doubt that these contacts, which have come easily to her and come easily to few others, are of great benefit to her.

At a Deathbed in the Year Two Thousand

Cast pity aside:

there has been enough of that. And forsake

grief and entrenched lamentation.

How is a man to loose his bonds

from this earth, this warden of death,

this world estranged from mirth?

Show me the joyous faces only.

Pride and quick wit I ask,

people who remember laughter,

clowns of some daring, fit

for an age that would gladly destroy

the last horizon of joy.

No more elegies now,

no wailing upon the tongues.

Here is an old man who bids you laugh,

and leaves to gray hairs his testament:

your frenzy and your despair, however high they mount,

only shake a stair already crumbling.

Laughter is what a man learns

at seventy or after,

the day he wearies of frowning

and the strength he was used to gives out.

Nothing is left us but laughter

to light the darkened abyss.

And since a little of time is still ours,

let us incline once more

not to “Oedipus” but to “The Clouds.”

Cheer the players and they will answer;

in the dismal land be proud,

and raise up the men of mirth.