Prothalamion / Edmund Spenser --
from The ocean to Cynthia / Walter Ralegh --
from Astrophil and Stella : "Who will in fairest book" / Philip Sidney --
"Down in the depth of mine iniquity" / Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke --
Last verses : "So well I love thee" / Michael Drayton --
from Doctor Faustus / Christopher Marlowe --
from The tempest / William Shakespeare --
A hymn to God the father / John Donne --
from Pleasure reconciled to virtue / Ben Jonson --
The white island, or place of the blest / Robert Herrick --
Love (III) / George Herbert --
Of the last verses in the book / Edmund Waller --
from Samson Agonistes / John Milton --
On Mr. Milton's Paradise Lost / Andrew Marvell --
The night / Henry Vaughan --
from The secular masque / John Dryden --
Upon nothing / John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester --
The day of judgment / Jonathan Swift --
from The dunciad (Book IV) / Alexander Pope --
On the death of Dr. Robert Levet / Samuel Johnson --
The cast-away / William Cowper --
To the accuser who is the god of this world / William Blake --
Extempore effusion upon the death of James Hogg / William Wordsworth --
Epitaph / Samuel Taylor Coleridge --
Memory / Walter Savage Landor --
On this day I complete by thirty-sixth year / George Gordon, Lord Byron --
from The triumph of life / Percy Bysshe Shelley --
This living hand / John Keats --
Terminus / Ralph Waldo Emerson --
Elegiac verse / Henry Wadsworth Longfellow --
from The rubaiyát of Omar Khayyám / Edward Fitzgerald --
Crossing the bar / Alfred, Lord Tennyson --
prologue from Asolando / Robert Browning --
Last lines / Emily Jane Brontë --
Night on the prairies / Walt Whitman --
Shelley's vision / Herman Melville --
Growing old / Matthew Arnold --
A ballad of past meridian / George Meredith --
Insomnia / Dante Gabriel Rossetti --
Passing away / Christina Rossetti --
The saddest noise / Emily Dickinson --
from The story of Sigurd the Volsung / William Morris --
Sonnet : between two seas / Algernon Charles Swinburne --
He never expected much / Thomas Hardy --
To R.B. / Gerard Manley Hopkins --
Low barometer / Robert Bridges --
Requiem / Robert Louis Stevenson --
from The ballad of Reading Gaol / Oscar Wilde --
They say my verse is sad / A.E. Housman --
The fabulists / Rudyard Kipling --
Cuchulain comforted / William Butler Yeats --
The dark angel / Lionel Johnson --
Why he was there / Edwin Arlington Robinson --
Monsieur qui passe / Charlotte Mew --
One more brevity / Robert Frost --
Liberty / Edward Thomas --
The lonely death / Adelaide Crapsey --
Of mere being / Wallace Stevens --
The world contracted to a recognizable image / William Carlos Williams --
Shadows / D.H. Lawrence --
Ejaculation / Elinor Wylie --
I have been warned / Robinson Jeffers --
from Little Gidding / T.S. Eliot --
Tetélestai / Conrad Aiken --
A worm fed on the heart of Corinth / Isaac Rosenberg --
To dear Daniel / Samuel Greenberg --
Futility / Wilfred Owen --
The dragonfly / Louise Bogan --
Fish food : an obituary to Hart Crane / John Brooks Wheelwright --
The broken tower / Hart Crane --
Black March / Stevie Smith --
Heart of autumn / Robert Penn Warren --
Missing dates / William Empson --
A lullaby / W.H. Auden --
Charon / Louis MacNiece --
In a dark time / Theodore Roethke --
To Walker Evans / James Agee --
Souls lake / Robert Fitzgerald --
Sonnet / Elizabeth Bishop --
Grief was to go out, away / Jean Garrigue --
Last poem / F.T. Prince --
Bone-flower elegy / Robert Hayden --
The first night of fall and falling rain / Delmore Schwartz --
Space walking / R.S. Thomas --
Staring at the sea on the day of the death of another / May Swenson --
Poem on his birthday / Dylan Thomas --
Henry's understanding / John Berryman --
Thinking of the lost world / Randall Jarrell --
Epilogue / Robert Lowell --
Language ah now you have me / W.S. Graham --
A silence / Amy Clampitt --
Aristocrats / Keith Douglas --
"The darkness and the light are both alike to thee" / Anthony Hecht --
Proverb / Kenneth Koch --
In view of the fact / A.R. Ammons --
Days of 1994 / James Merrill --
A winter daybreak above Vence / James Wright --
News from the dogs / Vicki Hearne --
The veiled suite / Agha Shahid Ali.