AN ANTHOLOGY BY HAROLD BLOOM HAROLD BLOOM AND JESSE ZUBA, EDITORS A Speciul Publication of THE LIBRARY OF AMERICA Contents Introduction, by Harold Bloom xxv About This Book, by Jesse Zuba xlix The Bay Psalm Book Psalme 19 1 Thomas Dudley "Dim Eyes, deaf Ears, cold stomack shew" 2 Roger Williams "God gives them sleep on Ground, on Straw" 3 "Boast not proud English, of thy birth & blood," 3 "They see Gods wonders that are call'd" 4 "The Indians prize not English gold," 4 Anne Bradstreet The Flesh and the Spirit 5 For Delivere from a feaver 8 "In silent night when rest I took" 8 'As weary pilgrim, now at rest" 10 John Saffin Consideratus Considerandus 11 Michael Wigglesworth from The Day of Doom: Vanity of Vanities 13 Edward Taylor from Preparatory Meditations: First Series 8. Joh. 6.51 17 38. IJoh. 2.1 18 from Preparatory Meditations: Second Series 12. Ezek. 37.24 19 18. Heb. 13.10 21 Let by rain 23 Upon a Spider Catching a Fly 24 Upon a Wasp Child with Cold 25 Huswifery 26 The Ebb and Flow 27 A Fig for thee Oh! Death 28 vii VIII CONTENTS Benjamin Tompson 'A Neighbour's Tears" 29 Nicholas Noyes "A Consolatory Poem Dedicated unto Mr. Cotton Mather" 30 John Norton Jr. 'A Funeral Elogy" 34 Cotton Mather The Rain gasped for 37 Mather Byles "Great GOD, how frail a Thing is Man!" 38 William Billings Chester 41 An Anthem, for Thanksgiving: Psalm 148 42 Timothy Dwight from The Triumph of Infidelity 43 Philip Freneau On the Religion of Nature 44 Phillis Wheatley On the Death of the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield 45 To a Lady on the Death of Three Relations 46 John Leland "The day is past and gone" 47 Joel Barlow from The Columbiad 48 John Quincy Adams O Lord, Thy All-Discerning Eyes 49 Richard Henry Dana Sr. The Little Beach-Bird 50 Emma Hart Willard Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep 51 Lydia Huntley Sigourney The Coral Insect 52 William Cullen Bryant Thanatopsis 54 To a Waterfowl 56 Forest Hymn 57 Hymn of the Waldenses 60 CONTENTS George Washington Doane Evening 61 Ralph Waldo Emerson The Problem 62 The Rhodora 64 Dirge 64 Brahma 66 Boston Hymn 67 rvcoGi ZEOUTOV 70 "There is in all the sons of men" 73 "I will not live out of me" 74 "He walked the streets of great New York" 75 "Shun passion, fold the hands of thrift," 76 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow A Psalm of Life 76 The Bridge 78 The Jewish Cemetery at Newport 80 Christmas Bells 82 My Cathedral 83 John Greenleaf Whittier First-Day Thoughts 83 The Eternal Goodness 84 Unity 87 Oliver Wendell Holmes The Chambered Nautilus 88 The Living Temple 89 Edmund Hamilton Sears "It came upon the midnight clear," 91 Christopher Pearse Cranch Correspondences 92 Enosis 93 Jones Very The New Birth 94 Enoch 95 The Cup 95 The New World 96 The Created 96 Yourself 97 The Cottage 97 Autumn Flowers 98 The Origin of Man 99 Night 100 CONTENTS William Ellery Channing Hymn of the Earth 100 Henry David Thoreau Sic Vita 101 Music 102 Inspiration 103 Julia Ward Howe Battle-Hymn of the Republic 106 James Russell Lowell After the Burial 107 Herman Melville from Moby-Dick 109 from Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land no The Enthusiast in Fragments of a Lost Gnostic Poem of the 12th Century 112 Pontoosuce 112 Walt Whitman "In vain were nails driven through my hands." 115 from Song of Myself 115 from Crossing Brooklyn Ferry 120 As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life 122 When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd 125 As Adam Early in the Morning 134 Chanting the Square Deific 134 A Noiseless Patient Spider 136 Frederick Goddard Tuckerman Sonnets 137 "Not the round natural world, not the deep mind," 138 Robert Lowry Beautiful River 138 Emily Dickinson "I got so I could take his name-" 140 "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain," 141 "I know that He exists." 141 "After great pain, a formal feeling comes-" 142 "Dare you see a Soul at the 'White Heat'?" 142 "Our journey had advanced-" 143 "It might be lonelier" 143 "I heard a Fly buzz-when I died-" 144 "To pile like Thunder to it's close" 145 "'Heavenly Father'-take to thee" 145 CONTENTS "The Spirit lasts-but in what mode-" 145 "My life closed twice before it's close;" 146 Helen Hunt Jackson A Last Prayer 146 Knowles Shaw Sowing in the Morning 147 Phillips Brooks O Little Town of Bethlehem 148 Sanford F. Bennett "There's a land that is fairer than day," 149 William Dean Howells What Shall It Profit? 150 Sidney Lanier A Ballad of Trees and the Master 150 John Banister Tabb Nekros 151 Communion 151 Tenebrae 152 Emma Lazarus In the Jewish Synagogue at Newport 152 The New Ezekiel 154 Edwin Markham In Death Valley 154 Lizette Woodworth Reese Trust 155 This Very Hour 155 Edith Wharton Terminus 156 W.E.B. Du Bois A Litany at Atlanta 158 Edwin Arlington Robinson The Children of the Night 161 Karma 163 James Weldon Johnson The Creation 163 Paul Laurence Dunbar An Ante-Bellum Sermon 166 Religion 169 XII CONTENTS Vincent O'Sullivan Out of the Cloud 169 Tr,umbull Stickney "He said: 'If in his image I was made," 170 'And, the last day being come, Man stood alone" 170 Anna Hempstead Branch In the Beginning Was the Word 171 Robert Frost A Prayer in Spring 175 Bereft 175 Design 176 Once by the Pacific 176 Directive 177 Ameen Rihani The Song of Siva 179 Renunciation 180 A Sufi Song 180 Carl Sandburg Our Prayer of Thanks 181 For You 181 William Stanley Braithwaite The Eternal Self ' 183 Vachel Lindsay General William Booth Enters Heaven 184 The Unpardonable Sin 186 Wallace Stevens Tea at the Palaz of Hoon •. 187 Sunday Morning 187 God Is Good. It Is a Beautiful Night 191 Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit 192 Angel Surrounded by Paysans 193 Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour 194 Of Mere Being 194 Kahlil Gibran O Soul 195 William Carlos Williams Burning the Christmas Greens 195 The Gift 198 Sara Teasdale The Sanctuary 200 CONTENTS H.D. from The Walls Do Not Fall 200 from The Flowering of the Rod 202 Moyshe-Leyb Halpern Memento Mori 205 The Will 205 Robinson Jeffers Shine, Perishing Republic 207 Apology for Bad Dreams 208 Hurt Hawks 211 The Treasure 212 Marianne Moore The Steeple-Jack 213 Elinor Wylie Address to My Soul 216 T. S. Eliot The Hippopotamus 217 Ash-Wednesday 218 Journey of the Magi 225 A Song for Simeon 227 Little Gidding 228 H. Leivick The Sturdy in Me 235 John Crowe Ransom Armageddon 236 Conrad Aiken Tetelestai 239 Mikhail Naimy Autumn Leaves 242 Claude McKay I Know My Soul • 244 Russian Cathedral 244 Edna St. Vincent Millay God's World 245 Samuel Greenberg God 245 E. E. Cummings "i thank You God for this amazing" 246 CONTENTS Charles Reznikoff Luzzato 247 Spinoza 247 "There is nobody in the street" 248 Jean Toomer Prayer 248 The Gods Are Here 248 Jacob Glatshteyn Without Offerings 249 Louise Bogan Night 250 John Wheelwright Fish Food 251 Come Over and Help Us 252 Bread-Word Giver 255 Melvin B. Tolson A Song for Myself 256 Leonie Adams Bell Tower 261 Hart Crane Lachrymae Christi 262 from Voyages 263 from The Bridge 264 O Carib Isle! 276 The Broken Tower 277 Thomas A. Dorsey Take My Hand, Precious Lord 278 Allen Tate The Cross 279 The Twelve 280 Sonnets at Christmas 280 Sterling A. Brown Sister Lou 281 Laura Riding There Is No Land Yet 283 Faith Upon the Waters 284 Langston Hughes The Negro Speaks of Rivers 285 Prayer 286 Heaven 286 CONTENTS Countee Cullen Simon the Cyrenian Speaks 286 The Litany of the Dark People 287 Carl Rakosi Meditation ("Three things remind me of You,") 288 Meditation ("How long will you remain a boy?") 288 Richard Eberhart The Groundhog 289 The Soul Longs to Return Whence It Came 290 Louis Zukofsky from "A" - 12 292 Stanley Kunitz Benediction 296 Kenneth Rexroth The Signature of All Things 298 Robert Penn Warren Evening Hawk 300 Heart of Autumn 301 W. H. Auden from Horae Canonicae 302 George Oppen Psalm 307 Theodore Roethke The Waking 308 In a Dark Time 309 James Agee "This little time the breath and bulk of being" 310 Elizabeth Bishop The Unbeliever 310 Over 2000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance 311 At the Fishhouses 313 William Everson A Canticle to the Waterbirds 315 Jean Garrigue A Demon Came to Me 319 Robert Hayden "From the corpse woodpiles, from the ashes" 319 Baha'u'llah in the Garden of Ridwan 320 The Broken Dark 321 XVI CONTENTS Ice Storm '. 322 'As my blood was drawn," 322 John Frederick Nims Prayer 323 The Dark Night 324 Knowledge of God 326 Muriel Rukeyser Are You Born? /I 326 Are You Born? / II 327 Delmore Schwartz At a Solemn Musick 327 Karl Shapiro The Alphabet 329 May Swenson Question 330 The Lightning 331 Big-Hipped Nature 331 Each Like a Leaf 332 John Berryman Eleven Addresses to the Lord 334 David Ignatow Kaddish 341 Randall Jar r ell Jonah 342 William Stafford With My Crowbar Key 343 Thomas Merton St. Paul 344 In Silence 345 Elegy for the Monastery Barn 346 Robert Lowell Where the Rainbow Ends 347 William Bronk Virgin and Child with Music and Numbers 348 The Mind's Limitations Are Its Freedom 349 Robert Duncan Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow 350 CONTENTS The Natural Doctrine .- 351 God-Spell 352 Amy Clampitt A Procession at Candlemas 353 Easter Morning 358 Brought From Beyond 358 A Silence 359 Howard Nemerov The Loon's Cry 361 Richard Wilbur 'A World Without Objects Is a Sensible Emptiness" 364 Advice to a Prophet 365 A Christmas Hymn 366 In a Churchyard 367 The Proof 369 James Dickey Adam in Winter 369 Walking on Water 371 Alan Dugan Love Song: I and Thou 372 Anthony Hecht A Hill 373 Adam 375 Saul and David 376 Richard Hugo St.