Poet's Choice
The Penguin Classics Series has issued in a new paperback edition The Complete Poems of Andrew Marvell, the 17th-century English poet. Marvell is a master of serious play, poetry that appealingly displays the energy of his mind -- urbane but capable of wonder, learned but the opposite of stuffy. For instance:
The Mower to the Glowworms
Ye living lamps, by whose dear light
The nightingale does sit so late,
And studying all the summer night,
Her matchless songs does meditate;
Ye country comets, that portend
No war, nor prince's funeral,
Shining unto no higher end
Than to presage the grass's fall;
Ye glowworms, whose officious flame
To wandering mowers shows the way,
That in the night have lost their aim,
