home

Thomas Gray

William Collins

William Wordsworth (Surprised by Joy)

William Wordsworth (Mutability)

Walter Savage Landor

George Gordon, Lord Byron

Percy Bysshe Shelley

John Keats

Robert Browning

George Meredith

Thomas Hardy

William Butler Yeats

Robert Frost (Putting in the Seed)

Robert Frost (Two Tramps in Mud Time)

Ezra Pound

Robinson Jeffers

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Jorge Luis Borges

Karl Shapiro

Richard Wilbur


ANTICIPATION OF LOVE
(translated by Alastair Read)

Neither the intimacy of your look, your brow fair as a feast day,
nor the favor of your body, still mysterious, reserved, and childlike,
nor what comes to me of your life, settling in words or silence,
will be so mysterious a gift
as the sight of your sleep, enfolded
in the vigil of my arms.
Virgin again, miraculously, by the absolving power of sleep,
quiet and luminous like some happy thing recovered by memory,
you will give me that shore of your life that you yourself do not own.
Cast up into silence
I shall discern that ultimate beach of your being
and see you for the first time, perhaps,
as God must see you --
the fiction of Time destroyed,
free from love, from me.