In a few days, we will enter 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 after were set to music.

What follows are a dozen of the most memorable and enduring lines in the mighty line of American poetry. Identify 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 more 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. The caged bird sings with a fearful trill
of things unknown but longed for still
and his tune is heard on the distant hill
for the caged bird sings of freedom.

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. Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost, to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

9. The fog comes
On little cat feet.

10. The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

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. “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” Maya Angelou 5. “Columbus,” Joaquin Miller 6. “O Captain! My Captain!,” Walt Whitman 7. “Because I could not stop for Death,” Emily Dickinson 8. “The New Colossus,” Emma Lazarus 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