I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.
Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me, so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.
This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.
1 comment:
a villanelle. see also: One Art by Elizabeth Bishop
from Now and Then: The Poet's Choice Columns, 1997-2000 by Robert Hass From the book's intro: This is a book of poems and small essays about them written over a period of about two years. It came about because Nina King, then literary editor of the Washington Post, invited me to write a weekly column for the Post’s Book World, The idea was that I would, each week, select a poem and comment on it. The aim was to introduce poetry to people who had never read it at all; to reintroduce it to people who had read it in school but had gotten out of the habit and, having an impulse to find their way back to it, didn’t know where to start; and to give people who did read poetry some poems and ideas about poems to think about. ... I was surprised, rereading the assembled pieces, by how much it resembled a Book of Hours. The reader of it watches the year turn, and the form invites short readings, meditations to be undertaken daily or weekly in quiet times. And, of course, it would be pleasing to me if it were read this way, since that’s the way in which I myself read poetry. I wrote the column this way because the sense of time in them is one of the things I like about newspapers. ... So this, it turns out, is a book about time.
Washington Post Book World
Poet's Choice archive: Washington Post: Poet's Choice.
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