April is National Poetry Month!

My favorite poetry anthology is called A Journey of Poems: An Original Anthology of Verse: Pope/Tennyson/Frost/Byron/Auden/Updike and forty-nine others, edited by Richard F. Niebling, published by Dell in 1964, retailing at that time for forty-five cents. I bought it at a library sale for ten cents maybe, hmm, six or seven years ago? It's a little paperback thing, weighing about two ounces--I actually took it with me when I went to Scotland for four months with only two small suitcases, and I read from it when I felt homesick. I love it as a book, I love the poems, I love it as an artifact of my past. It's my favorite book of poetry, even more than The Selected Works of Edna St. Vincent Millay, because it's not just a collection of one form, or theme, or era, or poet, but...a journey. The chapters are organized by theme--hope, horror, despair, birth, death, music--and because it's such a little thing, touching oh so lightly on the canon of English poetry, every poem in it is good. I haven't read them all. I'm not in a hurry. It's a journey.

I memorized this out of it six or seven years ago, and since forgot it even existed, but as soon as I saw the title, I was able to recite it.

Vachel Lindsay, "The Leaden-Eyed."

Let not young souls be smothered out before
They do quaint deeds and fully flaunt their pride.
It is the world's one crime that its babes grow dull
Its poor are oxlike, limp, and leaden-eyed.

Not that they starve, but starve so dreamlessly,
Not that they sow, but that they seldom reap,
Not that they serve, but have no gods to serve;
Not that they die, but that they die like sheep.