Poems

https://reason.com/volokh/2021/01/18/poetry-monday-evolution-by-langdon-smith/#comment-8712449

Baudelaire

Harmonie du soir, https://fleursdumal.org/poem/142

 
Voici venir les temps où vibrant sur sa tige
Chaque fleur s'évapore ainsi qu'un encensoir;
Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l'air du soir;
Valse mélancolique et langoureux vertige! ...

Frost, Robert

The Road Not Taken {{Quotation|  
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
 
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
 
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
 
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Hugo

LES DJINNS (https://www.oxfordlieder.co.uk/song/3739)

 
Murs, ville
Et port,
Asile
De mort,
Mer grise
Où brise
La brise
Tout dort.

Longfellow

Excelsior, https://www.bartleby.com/102/62.html Excelsior:

 
THE SHADES of night were falling fast,
As through an Alpine village passed
A youth, who bore, 'mid snow and ice,
A banner with the strange device,
                                          Excelsior!...

Millay

Dirge Without Music, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52773/dirge-without-music

 
I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned...

Paterson

Clancy of the Overflow (http://www.middlemiss.org/lit/authors/patersonab/poetry/clancy.html)

 
I had written him a letter which I had, for want of better
Knowledge, sent to where I met him down the Lachlan, years ago,
He was shearing when I knew him, so I sent the letter to him,
Just "on spec", addressed as follows: "Clancy, of The Overflow"...

Langdon Smith

Evolution ( https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/int/evolution.html; see also https://reason.com/volokh/2021/01/18/poetry-monday-evolution-by-langdon-smith/)

 
When you were a tadpole and I was a fish
In the Paleozoic time,
And side by side on the ebbing tide
We sprawled through the ooze and slime,
Or skittered with many a caudal flip
Through the depths of the Cambrian fen,
My heart was rife with the joy of life,
For I loved you even then…