O why do you walk through the fields in gloves,
Missing so much and so much?

Do you know me in the gloaming,
Gaunt and dusty grey with roaming?

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold

I taste a liquor never brewed—
From Tankards scooped in Pearl

I was angry with my friend;
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.

Before man came to blow it right
    The wind once blew itself untaught,
And did its loudest day and night
    In any rough place where it caught.

As you set out for Ithaka
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.

I had withdrawn in forest, and my song
Was swallowed up in leaves that blew alway...

High, high in the branches
the seawinds plunge and roar.
A storm is moving westward,
but here on the forest floor
the ferns have captured stillness.
A green sea growth they are.

Oh, the wild joy of living; the leaping from rock to rock,
The strong rending of boughs from the fir-trees, the cool
silver shock
Of the plunge in the pool’s living water, the hunt of the bear,
And the sultriness showing the lion is couch’d in his lair.

I spent the class period sharing with them three aspects of poetry that make it special, different from other forms of literature, and necessary to the human soul.

I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat

In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.

Hope is the thing with feathers—
That perches in the soul—
And sings the tune without the words—
And never stops—at all—

How arrives it joy lies slain,
And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide

The gray sea and the long black land;
And the yellow half-moon large and low;
And the startled little waves that leap
In fiery ringlets from their sleep…