Step through the golden gates of National Poetry Month. “There’s no money in poetry,” quoth poet laureate Robert Graves, “but there’s also no poetry in money.” While it is true that rhyme doesn’t pay, poets gain a foothold on eternity through their poems, and that luminous immortality outshines the evanescent flash of coins.
Let us not forget that Francis Scott Key’s “Oh say, can you see, by the dawn’s early light/What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming?” and Katherine Lee Bates’s “America! America!/God shed his grace on thee/And crown thy good with brotherhood/From sea to shining sea!” were first written as poems and only afterward were set to music.
What follows are a dozen of the most memorable and enduring lines in the mighty line of American poetry. Identify the sources of each quotation by title and author. Answers repose at the end of this column.
1. Listen, my children, and you will hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere.
On the eighteenth of April in seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.
2. The outlook wasn’t brilliant
for the Mudville nine that day;
The score stood four to two,
with but one inning left to play.
3. Once upon a midnight dreary,
while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious
volume of forgotten lore, —
4. By the shores of Gitche Gumee
By the shining Big-Sea-Water
5. Behind him lay the gray Azores,
Behind the Gates of Hercules;
Before him not the ghost of shores,
Before him only shoreless seas.
6. O Captain! My Captain!
Our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weathered every rack.
The prize we sought is won.
7. Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me –
8. This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
9. The fog comes
On little cat feet.
10. The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep.
11. All I could see from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood.
12. What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?
Answers
1. “Paul Revere’s Ride,” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 2. “Casey at the Bat,” Ernest Lawrence Thayer 3. “The Raven,” Edgar Allan Poe 4. “The Song of Hiawatha,” Henry Wadswoth Longfellow 5. “Columbus,” Joaquin Miller 6. “O Captain! My Captain!,” Walt Whitman 7. “Because I could not stop for Death,” Emily Dickinson 8. “The Hollow Men,” T. S. Eliot 9. “Fog,” Carl Sandburg 10. “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” Robert Frost 11. “Renascence,” Edna St. Vincent Millay 12. “Dream Deferred,” Langston Hughes