Others make verses of grace.
Mine are all muscle and sinew.
Others can picture your face.
But I all the tumult within you.
...
I've been a hopeless sinner, but I understand a
saint,
Their bend of weary knees and their con-
tortions long and faint,
...
You may think my life is quiet.
I find it full of change,
An ever-varied diet,
As piquant as 'tis strange.
...
My life is governed by the clock,
All duly mapped and plotted;
And only with a nervous shock
I miss the time allotted.
...
Down come the leaves,
Like fleeting years,
Or idle tears
Of love that grieves.
...
I might forget ambition and the hunger for success.
I might forget the passion to escape from nothingness.
I might forget the curious dreams of ecstasy that haunt
My fancy day and night. I might forget them. But I can't.
...
The ghost of night's long hours depart
In congregation dreary,
And leave my sorrow-trampled heart
Intolerably weary.
...
Of old our father's God was real,
Something they almost saw,
Which kept them to a stern ideal
And scourged them into awe.
...
You really can't imagine how I love the ancient Greeks.
I love the dancing language where their mobile spirit speaks.
I love the songs of Homer, flowing on like streams of light,
With a touch of human kindness in the splendid shock of fight.
...
I'm writing comedy again,
The daintiest pleasure known to men;
Unless a daintier might be
To watch your acted comedy:
...
When I was little,
My life was half fear.
My nerves were as brittle
As nature may bear.
...
O Robert Lee, you paladin,
I wonder how my words would strike you.
I know the portrait might have been
In many, many ways more like you.
...
I think about God.
Yet I talk of small matters.
Now isn't it odd
How my idle tongue chatters!
...
Just to utter a word,
That is all I desire;
That may still be heard,
When I expire;
...
Day and night I wander widely through the wilderness of thought, Catching dainty things of fancy most reluctant to be caught. Shining tangles leading nowhere I persistently unravel, Tread strange paths of meditation very intricate to travel.
...
I've had a few diseases,
And trifled with despair,
Tried failure which displeases,
And coquetted with care.
...
Sing a little, play a little,
Laugh a little; for
Life is so extremely brittle,
Who would think of more?
...
I'm sick to death of money, of the lack of it, that is,
And of practising perpetually small economies;
Of paring off a penny here, another penny there,
Of the planning and the worrying, the everlasting care.
...
They met, as it were, in a mist,
Pale, curious, eager, uncertain.
When each clasped the other and kissed,
The mist rolled aside like a curtain.
...
The huge old earth shook and quivered,
When it heard my passionate cry.
Why, even the little stars shivered
And almost went out in the sky.
...
Gamaliel Bradford was an American biographer, critic, poet, and dramatist. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, the sixth of seven men called Gamaliel Bradford in unbroken succession, of whom the first, Gamaliel Bradford, was a great-grandson of Governor William Bradford of the Plymouth Colony. Bradford attended Harvard University briefly with the class of 1886, then continued his education with a private tutor, but is said to have been educated "mainly by ill-health and a vagrant imagination. As an adult, Bradford lived in Wellesley, Massachusetts. The building and student newspaper for the Wellesley High School (where Sylvia Plath received her secondary school education) are named after Gamaliel Bradford. In his day Bradford was regarded as the "Dean of American Biographers. He is acknowledged as the American pioneer of the psychographic form of written biographies, after the style developed by Lytton Strachey. Despite suffering poor health during most of his life, Bradford wrote 114 biographies over a period of 20 years.)
Ardor
Others make verses of grace.
Mine are all muscle and sinew.
Others can picture your face.
But I all the tumult within you.
Others can give you delight,
And delight I confess is worth giving.
But my songs must tickle and bite
And burn with the ardor of living
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