Poetry

A Hymn to Aphrodite, Sappho ~ c. 600 BCE
Sappho's only surviving complete poem, known as the First Fragment, in a literal translation by Henry Wharton from 1885. I've also done a poetic translation based on this one.

A une Damoyselle malade, Clément Marot ~ 1537
The original French poem and a literal translation by Douglas Hofstadter. Hofstadter's book Le Ton beau de Marot centers around this poem and contains many poetic translations.

Hamlet's Soliloquy, William Shakespeare ~ 1600
From the Folger's edition, 3:1:64-98.

The World is Too Much With Us, William Wordsworth ~ 1807

The Arrow and the Song, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ~ 1845

The Raven, Edgar Allan Poe ~ 1845
My favorite poem.

Annabel Lee, Edgar Allan Poe ~ 1849

Song of Nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson ~ 1859

All in the Golden Afternoon, Lewis Carroll ~ 1865
The prefatory poem to Alice in Wonderland, describing the book's origins in a boat ride with his friends the Liddle family.

The Old Astronomer to His Pupil, Sarah Williams ~ 1868
The fourth stanza contains possibly my favorite line of poetry: "I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night."

Jabberwocky, Lewis Carroll ~ 1871
The nonsense poem from Through the Looking Glass, which coined the words chortle, galumph, and frumious.

The Owl and the Pussycat, Edward Lear ~ 1871

Invictus, William Ernest Henley ~ 1875

Wynken, Blynken, and Nod, Eugene Field ~ 1889

I Believe, Walt Whitman ~ 1892
Excerpted from Song of Myself, part 31, from the 1892 edition of Leaves of Grass. The whole poem can be found here.

The Road Not Taken, Robert Frost ~ 1915

Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening, Robert Frost ~ 1923

The Ones That I Worship, Pauline Parker ~ 1954
Pauline was 14 when she wrote this, just a few months before she and her best friend Juliet Hulme killed her mother. Their crime spawned many literary adaptations as well as the beautiful movie Heavenly Creatures.

Black Bird, Arthur Gordon Pym ~ 1994
A lipogram of "The Raven".

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