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Carpe Diem/Robert Frost

Age saw two quiet children

Go loving by at twilight,

he knew not whether homeward,

Or outward from the village,

Or (chimes were ringing) churchward,

He waited (they were strangers)

Till they were out of hearing

To bid them both be happy.

"Be happy, happy, happy,

And seize the day of pleasure."

The age-long theme is Age's.

Twas Age imposed on poems

their gather-roses burden

To warn against the danger

that overtaken lovers

From being overflooded

With happiness should they have it

And yet not know they have it.

But bid life size the present?

It lives less in present

Than in the future always,

An less in both together

than in the past. The present

Is too much for the senses,

Too crowding, too confusing-

Too present to imagine.

Desert Places//Robert Frost

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast

In a field I looked into going past,

And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,

But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The woods around it have it—it is theirs.

All animals are smothered in their lairs.

I am too absent-spirited to count;

The loneliness includes me unawares.

And lonely as it is that loneliness

Will be more lonely ere it be less—

A blanker whiteness of benighted snow

With no expression, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces

Between stars—on stars where no human race is.

I have it in me so much nearer home

To scare myself with my own desert places.

The Pasture/Robert Frost

I'm going out to clean the pasture spring;

I'll only stop to rake the leaves away.

(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):

I shan't be gone long. You come too.

I'm going out to fetch the little calf

That's standing by the mother. It's so young.

It totters when she licks it with her tongue.

I shan't be gone long. You come too.

Nothing Gold Can Stay/Robert Frost

Nature's first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf's a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

Dulce Decorum/Wilfred Owen

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys -- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsyhelmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime...
Dim, through the misty panes and thickgreen light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helplesssight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocenttongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To childrenardent for some desperateglory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patriamori.