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 -- Dirge / James Shirley -- 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 my 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 rubaiyt̀ of Omar Khayym̀ / Edward Fitzgerald -- Crossing the bar / Alfred, Lord Tennyson -- prologue from Asolando / Robert Browning -- Last lines / Emily Jane Bront -͡- 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 -- Tetľestai / 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.