{ "poems": [ { "id": "wygwyl", "title": "Where You Go When You Leave", "author": "the WYGWYL suite", "year": 2025, "kind": "suite", "status": "the lab's own poems, timed by the recorded voice", "source": "w01", "note": "Open it from the WYGWYL list: the suite's voice keeps the clock." }, { "id": "keats", "title": "Ode on a Grecian Urn", "author": "John Keats", "year": 1819, "kind": "poem", "status": "public domain (Wikisource, 1820 text)", "text": "Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness!\nThou foster-child of Silence and slow Time,\nSylvan historian, who canst thus express\nA flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:\nWhat leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape\nOf deities or mortals, or of both,\nIn Tempe or the dales of Arcady?\nWhat men or gods are these? what maidens loath?\nWhat mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?\nWhat pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?\n\nHeard melodies are sweet, but those unheard\nAre sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;\nNot to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,\nPipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:\nFair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave\nThy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;\nBold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,\nThough winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve;\nShe cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,\nForever wilt thou love, and she be fair!\n\nAh, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed\nYour leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;\nAnd, happy melodist, unwearied,\nForever piping songs forever new;\nMore happy love! more happy, happy love!\nForever warm and still to be enjoy’d,\nForever panting and forever young;\nAll breathing human passion far above,\nThat leaves a heart high sorrowful and cloy’d,\nA burning forehead and a parching tongue.\n\nWho are these coming to the sacrifice?\nTo what green altar, O mysterious priest,\nLead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,\nAnd all her silken flanks with garlands drest?\nWhat little town by river or sea-shore,\nOr mountain-built with peaceful citadel,\nIs emptied of its folk, this pious morn?\nAnd, little town, thy streets for evermore\nWill silent be; and not a soul to tell\nWhy thou art desolate, can e’er return.\n\nO Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede\nOf marble men and maidens overwrought,\nWith forest branches and the trodden weed;\nThou, silent form! dost tease us out of thought\nAs doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!\nWhen old age shall this generation waste,\nThou shalt remain, in midst of other woe\nThan ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,\n\"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,\"—that is all\nYe know on earth, and all ye need to know." }, { "id": "berry", "title": "The Peace of Wild Things", "author": "Wendell Berry", "year": 1968, "kind": "poem", "status": "bring your own" }, { "id": "cavafy", "title": "Ithaka", "author": "C. P. Cavafy", "year": 1911, "kind": "poem", "status": "bring your own (an English translation)" }, { "id": "coleridge", "title": "Kubla Khan", "author": "Samuel Taylor Coleridge", "year": 1816, "kind": "poem", "status": "public domain (Wikisource, 1816 text)", "text": "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan\nA stately pleasure-dome decree:\nWhere Alph, the sacred river, ran\nThrough caverns measureless to man\nDown to a sunless sea.\nSo twice five miles of fertile ground\nWith walls and towers were girdled round;\n\n And here were gardens bright with sinuous rills\nWhere blossom'd many an incense-bearing tree;\nAnd here were forests ancient as the hills,\nAnd folding sunny spots of greenery.\n\nBut oh that deep romantic chasm which slanted\nDown the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!\nA savage place! as holy and inchanted\nAs e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted\nBy woman wailing for her demon-lover!\nAnd from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,\nAs if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,\nA mighty fountain momently was forced:\nAmid whose swift half-intermitted Burst\nHuge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,\nOr chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:\nAnd mid these dancing rocks at once and ever\nIt flung up momently the sacred river.\n\n Five miles meandering with a mazy motion\nThrough wood and dale the sacred river ran,\nThen reached the caverns measureless to man,\nAnd sank tumult to a lifeless ocean:\nAnd 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far\nAncestral voices prophesying war!\n\nThe shadow of the dome of pleasure\nFloated midway on the waves;\nWhere was heard the mingled measure\nFrom the fountain and the caves.\nIt was a miracle of rare device,\nA sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!\n\nA damsel with a dulcimer\nIn a vision once I saw:\nIt was an Abyssinian maid\nAnd on her dulcimer she play'd,\n\n Singing of Mount Abora,\nCould I revive within me\nHer symphony and song,\nTo such a deep delight 'twould win me,\nThat with music loud and long,\nI would build that dome in air,\nThat sunny dome! those caves of ice!\nAnd all who heard should see them there,\nAnd all should cry, Beware! Beware!\nHis flashing eyes, his floating hair!\nWeave a circle round him thrice,\nAnd close your eyes with holy dread:\nFor he on honey-dew hath fed,\nAnd drank the milk of Paradise." }, { "id": "schleicher", "title": "The Sheep and the Horses", "author": "August Schleicher", "year": 1868, "kind": "fable", "status": "translation: this lab, from Schleicher's German", "text": "On a hill, a sheep that had no wool saw horses.\nOne was pulling a heavy wagon, one was carrying a great load, and one was carrying a man quickly.\n\nThe sheep said to the horses: my heart aches, seeing a man drive horses.\n\nThe horses said: listen, sheep, our hearts ache when we see this:\na man, the master, makes the wool of the sheep into a warm coat for himself,\nand the sheep has no wool.\n\nHearing this, the sheep fled into the plain." }, { "id": "basho", "title": "Old Pond", "author": "Matsuo Bashō", "year": 1686, "kind": "poem", "status": "translation: this lab", "text": "An old pond.\nA frog jumps in.\nThe sound of water." }, { "id": "zhuangzi", "title": "Cook Ding (Prince Hui's cook)", "author": "Zhuangzi, tr. Herbert Giles", "year": 1889, "kind": "prose", "status": "public domain (Wikisource, Giles 1889)", "text": "Prince Hui's cook was cutting up a bullock. Every blow of his hand, every heave of his shoulders, every tread of his foot, every thrust of his knee, every whshh of rent flesh, every chhk of the chopper, was in perfect harmony,—rhythmical like the dance of the Mulberry Grove, simultaneous like the chords of the Ching Shou.\n\nCommentators are divided in their identifications of these ancient morceaux.\n\n\"Well done!\" cried the Prince. \"Yours is skill indeed.\"\n\n\"Sire,\" replied the cook; \"I have always devoted myself to Tao. It is better than skill. When I first began to cut up bullocks, I saw before me simply whole bullocks. After three years' practice, I saw no more whole animals.\n\nMeaning that he saw them, so to speak, in sections.\n\nAnd now I work with my mind and not with my eye. When my senses bid me stop, but my mind urges me on, I fall back upon eternal principles. I follow such openings or cavities as there may be, according to the natural constitution of the animal. I do not attempt to cut through joints: still less through large bones.\n\nFor a curious parallelism, see Plato's Phædrus, 265.\n\n\"A good cook changes his chopper once a year,—because he cuts. An ordinary cook, once a month,—because he hacks. But I have had this chopper nineteen years, and although I have cut up many thousand bullocks, its edge is as if fresh from the whetstone. For at the joints there are always interstices, and the edge of a chopper being without thickness, it remains only to insert that which is without thickness into such an interstice.\n\nThese words help to elucidate a much-vexed passage in ch. xliii of the Tao-Tê-Ching. See The Remains of Lao Tzŭ, p. 30.\n\nBy these means the interstice will be enlarged, and the blade will find plenty of room. It is thus that I have kept my chopper for nineteen years as though fresh from the whetstone.\n\n\"Nevertheless, when I come upon a hard part where the blade meets with a difficulty, I am all caution. I fix my eye on it. I stay my hand, and gently apply my blade, until with a hwah the part yields like earth crumbling to the ground. Then I take out my chopper, and stand up, and look around, and pause, until with an air of triumph I wipe my chopper and put it carefully away.\"\n\n\"Bravo!\" cried the Prince. \"From the words of this cook I have learnt how to take care of my life.\"" }, { "id": "williams", "title": "The Red Wheelbarrow", "author": "William Carlos Williams", "year": 1923, "kind": "poem", "status": "public domain (1923); entered by hand, check against a printed source", "text": "so much depends\nupon\n\na red wheel\nbarrow\n\nglazed with rain\nwater\n\nbeside the white\nchickens" }, { "id": "wilbur", "title": "Mind", "author": "Richard Wilbur", "year": 1956, "kind": "poem", "status": "bring your own" }, { "id": "auden", "title": "The Shield of Achilles", "author": "W. H. Auden", "year": 1952, "kind": "poem", "status": "bring your own" }, { "id": "iliad18", "title": "Iliad 18: the Shield of Achilles", "author": "Homer, tr. Samuel Butler", "year": 1898, "kind": "epic", "status": "public domain (Wikisource, Butler 1898)", "text": "First he shaped the shield so great and strong, adorning it all over and binding it round with a gleaming circuit in three layers; and the baldric was made of silver. He made the shield in five thicknesses, and with many a wonder did his cunning hand enrich it.\n\nHe wrought the earth, the heavens, and the sea; the moon also at her full and the untiring sun, with all the signs that glorify the face of heaven- the Pleiads, the Hyads, huge Orion, and the Bear, which men also call the Wain and which turns round ever in one place, facing. Orion, and alone never dips into the stream of Oceanus.\n\nHe wrought also two cities, fair to see and busy with the hum of men. In the one were weddings and wedding-feasts, and they were going about the city with brides whom they were escorting by torchlight from their chambers. Loud rose the cry of Hymen, and the youths danced to the music of flute and lyre, while the women stood each at her house door to see them.\n\nMeanwhile the people were gathered in assembly, for there was a quarrel, and two men were wrangling about the blood-money for a man who had been killed, the one saying before the people that he had paid damages in full, and the other that he had not been paid. Each was trying to make his own case good, and the people took sides, each man backing the side that he had taken; but the heralds kept them back, and the elders sate on their seats of stone in a solemn circle, holding the staves which the heralds had put into their hands. Then they rose and each in his turn gave judgement, and there were two talents laid down, to be given to him whose judgement should be deemed the fairest.\n\nAbout the other city there lay encamped two hosts in gleaming armour, and they were divided whether to sack it, or to spare it and accept the half of what it contained. But the men of the city would not yet consent, and armed themselves for a surprise; their wives and little children kept guard upon the walls, and with them were the men who were past fighting through age; but the others sallied forth with Mars and Pallas Minerva at their head- both of them wrought in gold and clad in golden raiment, great and fair with their armour as befitting gods, while they that followed were smaller. When they reached the place where they would lay their ambush, it was on a riverbed to which live stock of all kinds would come from far and near to water; here, then, they lay concealed, clad in full armour. Some way off them there were two scouts who were on the look-out for the coming of sheep or cattle, which presently came, followed by two shepherds who were playing on their pipes, and had not so much as a thought of danger. When those who were in ambush saw this, they cut off the flocks and herds and killed the shepherds. Meanwhile the besiegers, when they heard much noise among the cattle as they sat in council, sprang to their horses, and made with all speed towards them; when they reached them they set battle in array by the banks of the river, and the hosts aimed their bronze-shod spears at one another. With them were Strife and Riot, and fell Fate who was dragging three men after her, one with a fresh wound, and the other unwounded, while the third was dead, and she was dragging him along by his heel: and her robe was bedrabbled in men's blood. They went in and out with one another and fought as though they were living people haling away one another's dead.\n\nHe wrought also a fair fallow field, large and thrice ploughed already. Many men were working at the plough within it, turning their oxen to and fro, furrow after furrow. Each time that they turned on reaching the headland a man would come up to them and give them a cup of wine, and they would go back to their furrows looking forward to the time when they should again reach the headland. The part that they had ploughed was dark behind them, so that the field, though it was of gold, still looked as if it were being ploughed- very curious to behold.\n\nHe wrought also a field of harvest corn, and the reapers were reaping with sharp sickles in their hands. Swathe after swathe fell to the ground in a straight line behind them, and the binders bound them in bands of twisted straw. There were three binders, and behind them there were boys who gathered the cut corn in armfuls and kept on bringing them to be bound: among them all the owner of the land stood by in silence and was glad. The servants were getting a meal ready under an oak, for they had sacrificed a great ox, and were busy cutting him up, while the women were making a porridge of much white barley for the labourers' dinner.\n\nHe wrought also a vineyard, golden and fair to see, and the vines were loaded with grapes. The bunches overhead were black, but the vines were trained on poles of silver. He ran a ditch of dark metal all round it, and fenced it with a fence of tin; there was only one path to it, and by this the vintagers went when they would gather the vintage. Youths and maidens all blithe and full of glee, carried the luscious fruit in plaited baskets; and with them there went a boy who made sweet music with his lyre, and sang the Linus-song with his clear boyish voice.\n\nHe wrought also a herd of homed cattle. He made the cows of gold and tin, and they lowed as they came full speed out of the yards to go and feed among the waving reeds that grow by the banks of the river. Along with the cattle there went four shepherds, all of them in gold, and their nine fleet dogs went with them. Two terrible lions had fastened on a bellowing bull that was with the foremost cows, and bellow as he might they haled him, while the dogs and men gave chase: the lions tore through the bull's thick hide and were gorging on his blood and bowels, but the herdsmen were afraid to do anything, and only hounded on their dogs; the dogs dared not fasten on the lions but stood by barking and keeping out of harm's way.\n\nThe god wrought also a pasture in a fair mountain dell, and large flock of sheep, with a homestead and huts, and sheltered sheepfolds.\n\nFurthermore he wrought a green, like that which Daedalus once made in Cnossus for lovely Ariadne. Hereon there danced youths and maidens whom all would woo, with their hands on one another's wrists. The maidens wore robes of light linen, and the youths well woven shirts that were slightly oiled. The girls were crowned with garlands, while the young men had daggers of gold that hung by silver baldrics; sometimes they would dance deftly in a ring with merry twinkling feet, as it were a potter sitting at his work and making trial of his wheel to see whether it will run, and sometimes they would go all in line with one another, and much people was gathered joyously about the green. There was a bard also to sing to them and play his lyre, while two tumblers went about performing in the midst of them when the man struck up with his tune.\n\nAll round the outermost rim of the shield he set the mighty stream of the river Oceanus." }, { "id": "lem", "title": "Love and Tensor Algebra (Trurl's Electronic Bard)", "author": "Stanisław Lem, The Cyberiad", "year": 1965, "kind": "poem", "status": "bring your own" }, { "id": "mon", "title": "non/tot III", "author": "Franz Mon", "year": null, "kind": "concrete poem", "status": "bring your own" }, { "id": "angelou", "title": "Still I Rise", "author": "Maya Angelou", "year": 1978, "kind": "poem", "status": "bring your own" }, { "id": "dthomas", "title": "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night", "author": "Dylan Thomas", "year": 1951, "kind": "poem", "status": "bring your own" }, { "id": "frost", "title": "The Road Not Taken", "author": "Robert Frost", "year": 1916, "kind": "poem", "status": "public domain (Wikisource, Mountain Interval 1916)", "text": "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,\nAnd sorry I could not travel both\nAnd be one traveler, long I stood\nAnd looked down one as far as I could\nTo where it bent in the undergrowth;\n\nThen took the other, as just as fair,\nAnd having perhaps the better claim,\nBecause it was grassy and wanted wear;\nThough as for that the passing there\nHad worn them really about the same,\n\nAnd both that morning equally lay\nIn leaves no step had trodden black.\nOh, I kept the first for another day!\nYet knowing how way leads on to way,\nI doubted if I should ever come back.\n\nI shall be telling this with a sigh\nSomewhere ages and ages hence:\nTwo roads diverged in a wood, and I—\nI took the one less travelled by,\nAnd that has made all the difference." }, { "id": "holderlin", "title": "In Lovely Blueness", "author": "Friedrich Hölderlin", "year": null, "kind": "prose poem", "status": "bring your own (an English translation)" }, { "id": "george", "title": "The Word (Das Wort)", "author": "Stefan George, read by Heidegger", "year": 1919, "kind": "poem", "status": "translation: this lab, from the public-domain German (Wikisource)", "text": "Wonder from far away, or dream,\nI brought to the border of my land\n\nand waited till the grey norn\nfound the name in her well.\n\nThen I could grasp it, dense and strong;\nnow it blooms and shines through the borderland.\n\nOnce I arrived after a good voyage\nwith a jewel, rich and delicate.\n\nShe searched a long time and told me:\n'Nothing like this sleeps here on the deep ground.'\n\nAt that it slipped from my hand\nand my land never won the treasure.\n\nSo I learned, sadly, to renounce:\nlet no thing be where the word breaks off." }, { "id": "stevens", "title": "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird", "author": "Wallace Stevens", "year": 1917, "kind": "poem", "status": "public domain (Wikisource, Harmonium)", "text": "Among twenty snowy mountains,\nThe only moving thing\nWas the eye of the black bird.\n\nI was of three minds,\nLike a tree\nIn which there are three blackbirds.\n\nThe blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.\nIt was a small part of the pantomime.\n\nA man and a woman\nAre one.\nA man and a woman and a blackbird\nAre one.\n\nI do not know which to prefer,\nThe beauty of inflections\nOr the beauty of innuendoes,\nThe blackbird whistling\nOr just after.\n\nIcicles filled the long window\nWith barbaric glass.\nThe shadow of the blackbird\nCrossed it, to and fro.\nThe mood\nTraced in the shadow\nAn indecipherable cause.\n\nO thin men of Haddam,\nWhy do you imagine golden birds?\nDo you not see how the blackbird\nWalks around the feet\nOf the women about you?\n\nI know noble accents\nAnd lucid, inescapable rhythms;\nBut I know, too,\nThat the blackbird is involved\nIn what I know.\n\nWhen the blackbird flew out of sight,\nIt marked the edge\nOf one of many circles.\n\nAt the sight of blackbirds\nFlying in a green light,\nEven the bawds of euphony\nWould cry out sharply.\n\nHe rode over Connecticut\nIn a glass coach.\nOnce, a fear pierced him,\nIn that he mistook\nThe shadow of his equipage\nFor blackbirds.\n\nThe river is moving.\nThe blackbird must be flying.\n\nIt was evening all afternoon.\nIt was snowing\nAnd it was going to snow.\nThe blackbird sat\nIn the cedar-limbs." }, { "id": "macleish", "title": "Ars Poetica", "author": "Archibald MacLeish", "year": 1926, "kind": "poem", "status": "public domain in the US (1926); entered by hand, check against a printed source", "text": "A poem should be palpable and mute\nAs a globed fruit,\n\nDumb\nAs old medallions to the thumb,\n\nSilent as the sleeve-worn stone\nOf casement ledges where the moss has grown—\n\nA poem should be wordless\nAs the flight of birds.\n\nA poem should be motionless in time\nAs the moon climbs,\n\nLeaving, as the moon releases\nTwig by twig the night-entangled trees,\n\nLeaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,\nMemory by memory the mind—\n\nA poem should be motionless in time\nAs the moon climbs.\n\nA poem should be equal to:\nNot true.\n\nFor all the history of grief\nAn empty doorway and a maple leaf.\n\nFor love\nThe leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—\n\nA poem should not mean\nBut be." }, { "id": "hopkins", "title": "Felix Randal", "author": "Gerard Manley Hopkins", "year": 1880, "kind": "poem", "status": "public domain (Wikisource)", "text": "Felix Randal the farrier, he is dead then? my duty all ended,\nWho have watched his mould of man, big-boned and hardy-handsome\nPining, pining, till time when reason rambled in it and some\nFatal four disorders, fleshed there, all contended?\n\nSickness broke him. Impatient he cursed at first, but mended\nBeing anointed and all; though a heavenlier heart began some\nMonths earlier, since I had our sweet reprieve and ransom\nTendered to him. Ah well, God rest him all road ever he offended!\n\nThis seeing the sick endears them to us, us too it endears.\nMy tongue had taught thee comfort, touch had quenched thy tears,\nThy tears that touched my heart, child, Felix, poor Felix Randal;\n\nHow far from then forethought of, all thy more boisterous years,\nWhen thou at the random grim forge, powerful amidst peers,\nDidst fettle for the great grey drayhorse his bright and battering sandal!" }, { "id": "houseofdust", "title": "A House of Dust (the form, with this lab's words)", "author": "after Alison Knowles and James Tenney", "year": 1967, "kind": "generator", "status": "the four-line form, generated here with the lab's own word lists; the original lists are not used", "text": "A house of mud\non an island\nusing candles\ninhabited by fishermen and their families\n\nA house of salt\nby the harbor\nusing the moon\ninhabited by strangers\n\nA house of glass\nby the harbor\nusing firelight\ninhabited by children playing\n\nA house of mud\non an island\nusing candles\ninhabited by children playing\n\nA house of leaves\non an island\nusing candles\ninhabited by the poet\n\nA house of brick\nby the harbor\nusing lanterns\ninhabited by horses and birds\n\nA house of rope\nin a desert\nusing the television\ninhabited by lovers\n\nA house of tin\nin the mountains\nusing the moon\ninhabited by children playing\n\nA house of sand\non an island\nusing lanterns\ninhabited by strangers\n\nA house of rope\nin a burning town\nusing the television\ninhabited by people who work at night" }, { "id": "brautigan", "title": "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace", "author": "Richard Brautigan", "year": 1967, "kind": "poem", "status": "bring your own" }, { "id": "jackjill", "title": "Jack and Jill", "author": "nursery rhyme", "year": 1765, "kind": "rhyme", "status": "public domain", "text": "Jack and Jill went up the hill\nTo fetch a pail of water;\nJack fell down and broke his crown,\nAnd Jill came tumbling after.\n\nUp Jack got, and home did trot,\nAs fast as he could caper;\nHe went to bed to mend his head\nWith vinegar and brown paper." }, { "id": "meeting", "title": "A site meeting (transcript)", "author": "written for this lab", "year": 2026, "kind": "meeting", "status": "the lab's own example of a transcript: speakers become strands", "text": "Maya: Thanks for coming in early. The river project is behind, and the bridge crew is waiting on our drawings.\nDev: We sent the drawings on Friday. They never arrived.\nMaya: Then someone has to drive them out to the site this morning.\nDev: I can leave now. The road along the water should be clear.\nRuth: While Dev drives, I'll call the foreman and tell him to hold the pour.\nMaya: Good. After the bridge is done, we meet again, here, at the same table." } ] }