A Postcard from the Volcano by Wallace Stevens (Lavinia)

A Postcard from the Volcano

BY WALLACE STEVENS

Children picking up our bones 

Will never know that these were once   

As quick as foxes on the hill; 

And that in autumn, when the grapes   

Made sharp air sharper by their smell   

These had a being, breathing frost; 

And least will guess that with our bones   

We left much more, left what still is   

The look of things, left what we felt 

At what we saw. The spring clouds blow   

Above the shuttered mansion house,   

Beyond our gate and the windy sky 

Cries out a literate despair. 

We knew for long the mansion's look   

And what we said of it became 

A part of what it is ... Children,   

Still weaving budded aureoles, 

Will speak our speech and never know, 

Will say of the mansion that it seems   

As if he that lived there left behind   

A spirit storming in blank walls, 

A dirty house in a gutted world, 

A tatter of shadows peaked to white,   

Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.

Level: Upper Sec

Themes: Transience, Mortality, Generations

Stylistic features: Free verse, Tercets

Mid-Term Break by Seamus Heaney (Lavinia)

Mid-Term Break

BY SEAMUS HEANEY

I sat all morning in the college sick bay

Counting bells knelling classes to a close.

At two o'clock our neighbours drove me home.

In the porch I met my father crying—

He had always taken funerals in his stride—

And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram

When I came in, and I was embarrassed

By old men standing up to shake my hand

And tell me they were 'sorry for my trouble'.

Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,

Away at school, as my mother held my hand

In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.

At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived

With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.

Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops

And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him

For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,

Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,

He lay in the four-foot box as in his cot.

No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

A four-foot box, a foot for every year.

Level: Upper Sec

Themes: Living, Death, Loss, Sorrow & Grieving, Relationships, Family & Ancestors

Stylistic Features: Lyric poem, Tercet

One Art by Elizabeth Bishop (Lavinia)

One Art

BY ELIZABETH BISHOP

The art of losing isn’t hard to master; 

so many things seem filled with the intent 

to be lost that their loss is no disaster. 

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster 

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. 

The art of losing isn’t hard to master. 

Then practice losing farther, losing faster: 

places, and names, and where it was you meant 

to travel. None of these will bring disaster. 

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or 

next-to-last, of three loved houses went. 

The art of losing isn’t hard to master. 

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, 

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. 

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster. 

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture 

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident 

the art of losing’s not too hard to master 

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Level: Upper Sec

Themes: Loss, Love, Confession

Stylistic Features: Villanelle, Hyperbole, End-stopped lines, Refrains, Fixed Verse, Tercets, Quatrains