Love is not all: It is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain,
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
and rise and sink and rise and sink again.
Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
pinned down by need and moaning for release
or nagged by want past resolution’s power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It may well be. I do not think I would.

You say there is no substance here,
One great reality above:
Back from that void I shrink in fear,
And child-like hide myself in love:
Show me what angels feel. Till then,
I cling, a mere weak man, to men.

You bid me lift my mean desires
From faltering lips and fitful veins
To sexless souls, ideal quires,
Unwearied voices, wordless strains:
My mind with fonder welcome owns
One dear dead friend’s remembered tones.

Forsooth the present we must give
To that which cannot pass away;
All beauteous things for which we live
By law of time and space decay.
But oh, the very reason why
I clasp them, is because I die.

It may be misery not to sing at all
And to go silent through the brimming day.
It may be sorrow never to be loved,
But deeper grief’s than these beset the way.

To have come near to sing the perfect song
And only by a half-tone lost the key,
There is the potent sorrow, there the grief,
The pale, sad staring of life’s tragedy.

To have just missed the perfect love,
Not the hot passion of untempered youth,
But that which lays aside its vanity
And gives thee, for thy trusting worship, truth–

This, this it is to be accursed indeed;
For if we mortals love, or if we sing,
We count our joys not by the things we have,
But by what kept us from the perfect thing.

To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of the crocus.
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

I don’t care if it rains or freezes
Because I have my plastic Jesus
Riding on the dashboard of my car
I can go a hundred miles an hour
‘Cause I’ve got almighty power
Right there on the dashboard of my car

Got myself a sweet Madonna
Dressed in rhinestones, sitting on a
Pedestal of abalone shell
Going ninety I ain’t scary
‘Cause I’ve got the Virgin Mary
Telling me that I won’t go to hell.

Riding down a thoroughfare
With his nose up in the air
A wreck may be ahead, but he don’t mind
Trouble coming He don’t see
He just keeps his eye on me
And any other thing that lies behind

When I’m in a traffic jam
He don’t care if I say "damn"
I can let all my curses roll
Plastic Jesus doesn’t hear
‘Cause he has a plastic ear
The man who invented plastic saved my soul

If I weave around at night
And policemen think I’m tight
They never find my bottle, though they ask
Plastic Jesus shelters me
For his head comes off you see
He’s hollow and I use Him for a flask

This is the version I seem to remember – the 1960’s, sign-on song of a disk jockey named Don Imis. There are other versions, like the one below.
Chuck

I don’t care if I’m broke or starvin’
As long as I’ve a fish named Darwin
Glued to the trunklid of my car
God, I’m feeling so evolved
Drivin’ with my problems solved
Proclaiming what I think of what we are

John McCrae
In Flanders Fields
Unsolved
The Night Cometh
Then and Now
Penance

Alfred Noyes
The Highwayman

Robert Frost
Fire and Ice
Stopping By the Woods on a Snowy Evening

Rudyard Kipling
If
The Law of the Jungle (excerpt)

Oliver Wendall Holmes
The Deacon’s Masterpiece

John Peale Bishop
A Recollection

Percy Bysshe Shelly
Ozymandias

Edna St. Vincent Millay
Sonnet #30
Spring

Abraham Lincoln
Letter to Mrs. Bixby (extraordinary prose)

William Blake
The Fly
The Tyger

T.S. Eliot
The Hollow Men

Omar Khayyam
The Rubaiyat (excerpt-1)
The Rubaiyat (excerpt-2)

Duncan Campbell Scott
The Forsaken
Enigma

Wendell Berry
Do Not Be Ashamed

Edith Nesbit
The Despot

Walt Whitman
A Noiseless Patient Spider

Carl Sandberg
Languages

Eric Idle
All Things Dull and Ugly

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Nature

William Cory
Mimnermus in Church

Don Imus*
Plastic Jesus

Francis William Bourdillon
The Night Has a Thousand Eyes

William Shakespeare
Soliloquy from Hamlet

Amy Levy
Magdalen

Hank Williams
I’m So Lonesome I could Cry

Aleksander Pushkin
I Loved You

Charles L. Williamson
Flame Testing HAIKU
Slippery Edges
What If?
Gossamer

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Brahma

Jalaluddin Rumi
It is Thee

Emily Dickinson
"Hope" Is A Thing With Feathers

Joseph Conrad
In Youth (poetic prose)

William Ernest Henley
Invictus

Paul Lawrence Dunbar
Life’s Tragedy

Bliss Carman
Earth Voices

Emma Lazarus
The New Colossus

Everly Brothers (performed by)
Let It Be Me (lyrics)

Unknown
Risk and Freedom

William Butler Yeats
The Mermaid

To Mrs. Bixby, Boston, Mass.

Dear Madam,

I have been shown in the files
of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant
General of Massachusetts that you are the mother of
five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle.
I feel how weak and fruitless must be any word of
mine which should attempt to beguile you from the
grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain
from tendering you the consolation that may be found
in the thanks of the republic they died to save. I
pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish
of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished
memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride
that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice
upon the altar of freedom.

Yours very sincerely and respectfully,

A. Lincoln

The night has a thousand eyes,
And the day but one;
Yet the light of the bright world dies
With the dying sun.

The mind has a thousand eyes,
And the heart but one;
Yet the light of a whole life dies
When love is done.

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame,
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “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-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row
That mark our place: and in the sky
The larks still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The Torch: be yours to hold it high!
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.