The Beautiful, Mild Woman
The speaker sits with two women—one is his love interest and the other is her friend, whom he introduces in line 2 as the "beautiful, mild woman." For a poem that bemoans the lack of "fine" thing...
Poetry and Love
Poetry is hard, argues the speaker in the first stanza; line 6 refers to the necessity of "stitching and unstitching" in order to make the lines perfect. But it can't look like it was hard work. In...
The Moon
Just as the speaker and the two women become quiet at the mention of love, he notices the moon "in the trembling blue-green of the sky" (31). As he says in lines 32-33, it seems worn, like a seashe...
Work and Idle Play
Ever since the fall of man, says the speaker in line 23, we have all had to work for the good things in life. But some of those good things, like poetry, require work that doesn't look like work—...