Free Love Poetry Out Loud by Robert Alden Rubin

Yeats poems in this book. She mostly kept him at arm’s length, though, and later married a “drunken vainglorious lout” (Yeats’s words) active in the Irish independence movement. In this poem by the young Yeats, the poet seems to sense that no happy ending awaits, and imagines his love old and alone in years to come
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    Love … crowd of stars =
How idealized love banished earthly, “real” love
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W HEN Y OU A RE O LD
    W. B. Yeats
    W hen you are old and grey and full of sleep,
    And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
    And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
    Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
    How many loved your moments of glad grace,
    And loved your beauty with love false or true,
    But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
    And loved the sorrows of your changing face.
    And bending down beside the glowing bars,
    Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
    And paced upon the mountains overhead
    And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
I W ILL N OT G IVE T HEE A LL M Y H EART
    Grace Hazard Conkling
    I will not give thee all my heart
    For that I need a place apart
    To dream my dreams in, and I know
    Few sheltered ways for dreams to go:
    But when I shut the door upon
    Some secret wonder—still, withdrawn —
    Why does thou love me even more,
    And hold me closer than before?
    When I of love demand the least,
    Thou biddest him to fire and feast:
    When I am hungry and would eat,
    There is no bread, though crusts were sweet.
    If I with manna may be fed,
    Shall I go all uncomforted?
    Nay! Howsoever dear thou art,
    I will not give thee all my heart.

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    A PROPER RESERVE
    Society teaches us to hold back something of ourselves, but what’s not said between two lovers can become more important than what is. The next two poems are portraits of reserve, one before it becomes a problem, the other one after
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    Manna =
Heavenly food that sustained the Israelites in the wilderness when they had no bread
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    Seduced and Abandoned?
    As a means of self-preservation, the speaker in Conkling’s poem resists the urge to give herself up entirely to her lover, whom she suspects will discard her as soon as he “solves” her mystery
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    Bad Sun Rising
    Imagine this setting near a lovely pond, with green leaves, birds singing, and light in the lovers’ eyes, and you can perhaps imagine the deception that Hardy mentions here—the way in which he saw what he wanted then, and now sees it for what it was
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    Chidden of =
Scolded by
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    More by our love =
This is tricky to read; it helps if you pause between “by” and “our.” so that the sense of the line is that their love deteriorated further because of the words exchanged
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N EUTRAL T ONES
    Thomas Hardy
    W e stood by a pond that winter day,
    And the sun was white, as though chidden of God,
    And a few leaves lay on the starving sod;
    â€” They had fallen from an ash, and were gray.
    Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove
    Over tedious riddles of years ago;
    And some words played between us to and fro
    On which lost the more by our love.
    The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing
    Alive enough to have strength to die;
    And a grin of bitterness swept thereby
    Like an ominous bird a-wing. …
    Since then, keen lessons that love deceives,
    And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me
    Your face, and the God-curst sun, and a tree,
    And a pond edged with grayish leaves.
“I H EAR AN ARMY CHARGING UPON THE LAND”
    James Joyce
    I hear an army charging upon the land,
    And the thunder of horses plunging, foam about their knees:
    Arrogant, in black armor, behind them stand,
    Disdaining the reins, with fluttering whips, the charioteers.
    They cry unto the night their battle-name:
    I moan in sleep when I hear afar their whirling laughter.
    They cleave the gloom of dreams, a blinding flame,
    Clanging, clanging upon the heart as upon an anvil.
    They come