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Poet's Choice

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Only thin smoke without flame

From the heaps of couch-grass;

Yet this will go onward the same

Though Dynasties pass.

III

Yonder a maid and her wight

Come whispering by:

War's annals will cloud into night

Ere their story die.

A long perspective in time, but with vocal immediacy -- that combination seems, in the guesswork of reading between times and countries, to characterize these two poets.

(Kim Sowol's poem "A Later Day" can be found in "Azaleas: A Book of Poems," translated from the Korean by David R. McCann. Columbia Univ. Press. Copyright 2007 by Columbia Univ. Press. Thomas Hardy's poem "In Time of 'The Breaking of Nations' " can be found in "The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy." Macmillan. Copyright 1976 by Macmillan London Ltd.)

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