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Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and…

I am trying to pry open your casket
with this burning snowflake.

I’ll give up my sleep for you.
This freezing sleet keeps coming down
and I can barely see.

If this trick works we can rub our hands
together, maybe

start a little fire
with our identification papers.
I don’t know but I …

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birth is, by his presence,
some tragic falling…

If in reading the poem you get distracted by an irritable need to come up with a consistent, coherent set of ideas that the speaker has in his feelings about the urn, an overall message about the urn, or silence, or time, or mortality, instead of thinking about the statements of the poem as a serie…

Shakespeare’s plays are, as we know, populated by some of the most vivid characters ever created. They feel alive to us. When we read them, or see and hear them onstage, we experience each of these characters as fully developed beings, with ways of seeing the world that are, for them when they are …