Classic and Contemporary Poetry
PERSONALITY, by WILLIAM ROSE BENET Poet Analysis Poet's Biography First Line: With words of other men, with memories Last Line: No man may teach. Subject(s): Self | ||||||||
With words of other men, with memories Bewildered quite, Strange with a pulse that, quicker than all these, Tells wrong from right, My mind marks thought on thought that flits and flees By day and night. Flickering a thousand thoughts of hope and fear, Of joy and pain, To the events that rouse, the moods that veer Each day again, Harried and clamorous, alert and clear, So shifts my brain. A treasure-house, a fairyland, a waste, A field of war; Jewelled with constellations, and erased Of every star; Save in dead sleep immediate with haste To make or mar; Such is mine instrument upon mine act, With something there Battling its baser fears to found on fact Whate'er shines fair Throughout its round; to reason, to exact; Flash praise or prayer. As one who through a train's swift window sees The fields at night Shift and change form, behind their flickering trees, -- The moon's pale light Show foaming falls -- a forest's mysteries -- High mountains bright. So my brain holds and loses vision of Whoe'er devised Our life-long questioning, our life-long love; Blindly apprised Of miracle; athrill with each new move To Truth new-guised. And the blood burns or shivers through my veins, And the fleet days Possess me with their fugitive sharp pains, Sweet pangs, delays And onsets, -- and my million brother brains Scan me at gaze. From the hot hearts of all my ancestry, Their mental toils, My heart takes fire, the mind they gave to me Snatches its spoils; And no man knows me, nor myself I see Through all that foils. Friends mark me by my pleasure or my task. My lips have speech. They read by these, and I; yet ever ask Nor find in each That Self which, till this Pythian world unmask, No man may teach. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...A CAPELLA by JUAN FELIPE HERRERA AFTER LOOKING UP INTO ONE TOO MANY CAMERAS by HICOK. BOB FOR A TALL HEADSTONE by JOHN HOLLANDER SELF-EMPLOYED by DAVID IGNATOW WHY CAN'T I BE by DAVID IGNATOW THE FALCONER OF GOD by WILLIAM ROSE BENET |
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