Eli Siegel Poems

Shakespeare, Compactly

Look at Hamlet
What Hamlet’s father said to him,
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Quiet in the street,
In the street with houses having babies,
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Swiftly in forests, the zebra,
Slowly the Mississippi;
Zebras are by the Mississippi,
Not so by, but by.
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Twenty-one Distichs about Children

Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie
Thy soul's immensity.—WORDSWORTH
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What is sound, as standing for the world and the mind of man at
any time, and in any situation?
Sound is an unknown, immeasurable reservoir which has been gone
into and used to have chants, rituals, jigs, bourrées, sonatas,
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Curiously the wilderness
Had thousands of little beings going about in its wide, dark, cool ground, underneath the tall, uncaring trees.
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A girl, in ancient Greece,
Be sure, had no more peace
Than one in Idaho.
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O Milwaukee eagle, circler over muddy rivers,
Who takes the sun contentedly and air approvingly;
Who never has alighted on languidly carried parasols had by tall ladies in brown;
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Know you him, O, him,
Who lived in those days?
He wore a gay coat,
And he stepped along, jauntily, jauntily,
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Quiet and green was the grass of the field,
The sky was whole in brightness,
And O, a bird was flying, high, there in the sky,
So gently, so carelessly and fairly.
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