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.

Little Fly,
Thy summers play
My thoughtless hand
Has brushed away.

Am not I
A fly like thee?
Or art not thou
A man like me?

For I dance
And drink and sing,
Till some blind hand
Shall brush my wing.

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover’d country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all…

---

Soliloquy: The act of talking to oneself.
Contumely: Rude language or treatment
Bodkin: Dagger or Stiletto
Fardels: Burdens
Bourn: Destination