Collected Poems of John Holmes

Holmes, John A., Jr.

2002

Keys

Keys

 

With pockets empty I was free,

Before I knew the mocking

Jingle of a bunch of keys

For locking and unlocking.

Now half my thought and breath

And nearly all my walking,

Are hurry toward or haste away

From locking and unlocking.

 
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  • This text is a compilation of poems by John Holmes.
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 Title Page
 Editor's Note
 On hearing someone say that every possible subject has been covered in poetry
 Reminder
 Sonnet [To someone I know]
 Low fog
 [Lines about a great space]
 Sanctuary
 To Joanne
 The soul's loneliness
 You, who understood
 Morning
 What things I can
 The father
 The gleam
 My tree
 My little world
 The vale impassable
 The forgotten hero
 The garden
 Verbosity
 [Man]
 A monument
 A death at evening
 Recipe for a journey
 Evening
 From a window
 Sight and death
 In the days when the eternal hills go down
 Something from the soft wind
 Noon
 The moon
 In a time of misunderstanding
 Demand
 The constant battle
 Sleepless
 A prayer [A prayer on failing eyesight]
 On being thankful
 Pleasant solitude
 [Untitled]
 Somehow, sometime, somewhere
 [Untitled]
 The pines
 A shield and a strong defence
 The high heart
 Bewilderment in church
 Advice on success in writing poetry
 Pierrot
 Encouragement
 Three wishes
 Swinging
 Tobacco and a pipe
 Grandmother's parlor
 Sailing
 O little sails, make haste!
 Night
 Walking on the beach
 From the Window
 On the contemplation of vastness
 The king passes by
 Youth
 Beneath a tree
 Beyond the hill
 Books
 To a statuette of a little girl
 Wanderer's song
 Joshua Peabody
 Against poms and carelessness
 The way of least resistance
 Voice of the sea
 A letter unopened on my desk
 Fragments: Far horizon
 Fragments: The inquiring mind
 Fragments: The cigarette
 Fragments: History repeats
 Fragments: Yesterday, to-day, to-morrow
 Fragments: After the forest fire
 Fragments: Down to earth
 Fragments: Butter side down
 Fragments: A conversation
 Fragments: Fear
 Fragments: Inconsistency
 Fragments: A secret laughter
 To a small boy learning to read
 Reading sonnets late at night
 Autumn
 Lonely
 Walking home at night
 A ship's figure-head
 This house will never need
 Conversation
 Dusk falls down the roofs
 Moment
 Words for a minuet
 Make yourself a way
 Languor
 A childish chant
 Twice born
 Suddenly I knew
 Coming home from the library
 The visitor
 Four Songs
 The willow tree
 Rhymes of a very small boy
 Big enough
 Baggage into the land of Nod
 Song - Come again with me to Plymouth
 Portrait
 Portrait [The Great Man]
 A hopeful lover
 Portrait of a girl
 Writing in the woods
 Memory of A. L.
 Portrait
 The prisoner
 The warehouseman
 A timid lover
 Message to be found a hundred years hence
 What poetry is
 Wind on a hill
 Two o'clock
 Song
 Another sleeps
 Portrait [His enemy]
 Portrait
 Departure
 A fancy
 At the end
 The eyesore
 The candle
 An intruder
 Counterpoint
 The street car
 Equality
 Petulant
 On a hillside
 Gifts
 An old man tells a story
 Peccavi
 Old groping
 Make believe
 Josita's banjo song
 Let it be said
 A yonge manne; an olde tale
 The cantadours pass by
 I sing
 Thoughts of a man asleep
 To poets: advice
 Amaze
 The reverent lover
 A quotation
 The unseen lady
 My bookshelf
 Thoughts at night
 Suspicion
 Fall in Massachusetts
 Music
 America
 I remember
 Lines to an old dish
 Window glass
 Sonnet
 At a funeral
 Disillusionment
 The seekers
 Il Penseroso (R.S.)
 Effect of praise
 When hearts are young
 The clean winds
 The lover serenades
 The little street
 Laughter
 To one gone
 The dancers
 A poet burns some poems
 Writing
 Walking in the rain
 A sacrifice to the sun
 To my cousin, H.R.B.
 The boat
 Poem
 Overture
 Snow
 Hope
 A song for you
 Window dreaming
 Rain the morning after
 A man's club
 From the tower
 Fairies by night
 The young poet
 Rain
 Say good night
 The thought of you
 A youth
 Nocturne
 Courage
 Cinquain
 Circles
 The cabin boy climbs the crow's nest
 On going to bed
 Three roads
 1492
 October
 Pan
 Soldiers
 To a girl who has black eyes
 The hilly place
 The call
 Lines
 The poet's prayer
 Futility
 The priest
 Meditation
 Two songs
 Cappricco
 Stars
 Westward ho!
 Rain
 A man remembers suddenly
 At the museum
 Morning in the forest
 A charm to keep away evil
 The lover grows older
 An apology
 An old legend retold on the occasion of a certain death
 Aftermath
 Old words
 Raw material
 Masks
 The grace of god
 Fragment
 Dusk
 The skylark's flight
 The old chief
 Sudden pity
 To a young man cleaning a motor-car
 Labor
 An old friend
 Fragment from an old dance
 A parting of the way
 Song of my elf
 Moon to a vagabond child
 The violinist
 A toast
 Dream places
 The second-hand bookshop
 The fireplace
 The breeze
 The seeker
 The market
 The world, the world...
 Trees
 You asked
 Excuse
 Ideals
 Recapture
 Ask me not now
 Youth goes forth
 Peace
 Outburst
 Prayer against blindness
 A memory
 Who has not known
 The pure of heart
 A life
 At camp-fire
 Book-reading
 The end of day
 In the arbor
 A fireplace in December
 Poems on pictures
 Laus perennis
 Steps
 The angel of love
 Matinata
 To a player at the Globe
 A portrait [My sister]
 An old poet
 Pageant
 Ruin
 From a hollow in the woods
 Twenty
 October dusk
 Life
 Direction
 The shining road
 Old music
 Song to be said to my pillow
 Sounds
 If ever
 Fragment
 A door
 After
 Relief
 Passing
 Trees in the wind
 Candles
 Weary
 The fog
 The puddle
 [Mood] Workman
 Conrad has an evening
 The child on the other shore
 Song
 A pale lady looks in a deep well
 A life
 Poetry and music [Poem] [A poem can tell]
 For the grave of unknown citizens
 To himself
 The coward
 [Moment macabre: symphony]
 Midnight
 Girl with a Spanish shawl (a picture)
 Conrad sleeping
 Tell me why
 Questioning
 An inscription
 An old, old man
 Rather than this
 If this were the last
 Portrait [His World]
 A letter in March
 Rocks
 Your head
 Money
 The old man and the moon
 The flaming lights
 Home
 The long watch
 On quiet hill
 Consideration of a friend
 Song
 Price of wisdom
 Consecrate
 Jingle verse: The Boston Wanderlust
 A sailor's R.I.P.
 Turn from the fire
 Ballad of an ordinary man
 What might have been
 Ease after pain
 An April afternoon
 Stone and roots
 To Peter, who is not a real person
 Two sonnets on death and immortal man [The cold shadow]
 To a girl I know
 My enemy
 On the new moon
 Mowing
 The shore
 Wind in the night
 Quickening
 On awakening suddenly
 To the easily forgotten
 On seeing the title 'Heart of darkness'
 The marchers in the shadow
 Poem
 The hour
 Peter has an evening
 Sonnet
 Tower of glass
 My attic room
 Tir na n'og
 Keys
 The philosopher at home
 Counsel from a poet, middle-aged
 The answer afterwards
 Waking [One way of waking]
 The servants of the heart
 The password
 An armchair journey
 In praise of my god
 A tide of dreams
 Good bye to a garden
 The old men
 Prayer to be shouted
 The clock strikes ten [The bell]
 To a careful young man
 Now!
 This was the way
 For he hath fed
 Memory
 Program
 Cazevieille [Part one: The fire; Part two: Walking and rowing; Part three: Others; Part four: Things there are only one of; Part five: Plum island
 Knowing what I know
 To losers
 Rainy April noon
 Passage to India [What dragons]
 The word [Bird of the morning sea]
 To music first
 The right word
 Burn!
 Who that has heard him
 Einsteinian [Wind like music]
 Ten years old before the mast
 Three woodcuts: Motor at midnight; Ship in the night; Downtown ritual
 The way the eagles die
 Even a prayer
 Adventures in the dark
 March 17, 1939 [Matriarch]
 Native timber
 The launching
 Circumstance unforeseen
 Special performance
 A matter of time
 Whatever I have said before [Sun Worshipper]
 New England names
 Class poem 1929, Tufts College
 Sell it to them, ad man!
 In a college coffee house [College coffee house]
 Prologue for poems
 Dutch dream
 Marginal notes
 Change
 Citizen saint
 Civic ceremony
 Clean tall green still
 Collectives
 Coming of age
 Cool
 Country morning
 Day among many
 Death be not proud
 Death this year
 Portrait
 Sometimes to be alone
 Monument
 Lying awake
 Election
 The eleventh commandment
 Errata
 Every day in books
 Faculty committee on teaching
 Familiar tale
 The family face
 Family letter [In our times]
 Father
 Hard times
 Hinbad
 A meditation
 Barberry
 Like spring
 The symbols
 Bless
 The soul in the possession
 Being so
 The fear of dying
 Fieldbook revised [Fieldbook for summer]
 The flying earth
 Ritual - For a cow to be killed [For a cow before killing] [Cow be killed]
 Four and a half [Boy]
 Grass
 Go, cries the heart
 Great law
 The green door
 Having New England fathers
 Hearing music
 Heart's almanac
 Herself
 I can hardly wait
 I live in a world
 Incredible greeting
 Journey's end
 The known world [Map of my country]
 The landmark
 Rock in the ground
 Do you know?
 The laws [Order clearly asking]
 Let them stand: for Robert Nichols, geologist
 The letter
 Letter to my mother
 Lines beginning 'I'
 Address to the living
 Alarm
 Along the row
 Anecdote of Robert Frost
 The architects
 As the heart beats
 Auction
 Birthday: at Richard Eberhart's fiftieth
 Boy in August
 Boy to anyone
 Bucyrus [Booth, Bucyrus & Brazil]
 Business-like letter
 Carry me back
 The flowers (first version) [Home from Woodlawn]
 The certainty
 Edward Hicks's old picture
 Faithful reader
 The new porch
 Two of a kind
 In the Gardner museum
 The war between the states
 Margaret's choice
 Everyone knows about Boston
 Mailman blues
 The mask the living wear
 Memorandum of agreement
 Memory [Memory's color]
 Mercator
 Metaphor for my son
 The mirror
 Montaigne's pate
 Misery [Essay on misery]
 People in the street [At thirty-five]
 Do not pity the young
 West mountain spring [West mountain water]
 The second wonder
 The place he seeks
 The enduring
 New Proverbs
 The new view [Youth and age]
 Noah his ark
 Northward letter [In this moment]
 Nothing told me
 Old men and young men
 One day's rain
 Ordeal by love
 The overgrown back yard
 Panther in my mind [The panther in the mind]
 The people's peace
 Peter at his mirror
 But choose
 The pity is
 The place of light
 Portrait
 Open letter [Christmas letter] [From tonight]
 Pour down
 Puritan ancestor
 Questions for the candidate
 Reading aloud
 The rebellion
 The saving grace
 Seasonal wisdom
 The secret
 Self portrait
 Send, send
 Silence
 Since you asked
 The skin of your face
 Sleep and poetry
 Sonnet for solace [O heart be quick]
 To the queen's men [Sonnet to the queen's men]
 Spring is the peace
 Summer morning porch (Chautauqua Lake)
 Summer opera
 September valentine
 Better than all [Better than all these]
 Take home this heart
 Then the sun came out
 The new art
 Then he will sleep
 Till music cries again
 To keep and not to keep [These conditions] [What to keep, what to lose]
 To live in
 The tower stands
 To my sisters and my brother [To my teacher]
 Truth about pictures
 Two and a little house
 The unforgiven
 Unlikely tale
 Unpublished preface to a Ph.D. thesis
 Ten-thirty class
 The valiant
 Very young, very old
 The voice
 Poem for my 27th year [For the poet's birthday]
 All except Mary Ann
 The way the stars went up
 Weather making
 What the books do
 Who are they?
 A willing suspension
 Without honor
 The wreath
 Hello
 Underwater
 [Untitled]
 [Untitled]
 Sally [Warning with love]
 One place
 These ghosts
 Mellow and merry
 Living in cities
 Various loyalties
 Arrows and angry snakes
 Old Adam in us
 After two years
 King time
 The secret epilogue [Epilogue untold]
 That is the way you look [Face to face]
 Legend and truth
 From everlasting unto everlasting
 If I were old [The bitter thought]
 The mind by day
 Poets take heart
 You living look [A hundred years from now]
 Two kinds: bold and shy
 The voice
 Hold it up to the light
 Words of my own
 Dialogue alone [Even now]
 A cure of guilt
 The core [One sound]
 Country senses
 Chair in the field
 The broken one
 Between thousand and thousands
 Few in a million
 The fiery element
 The flower
 The folding key
 For sports section of Jumbo Book
 The fortune teller
 From Brooklyn
 Guard of honor
 Hamlet with a license
 Hearing Margaret, aged four
 Her walking
 Holiday, with gods
 I am singing. We are singing.
 I never get any work done
 If not silence, then restraint
 Living music
 Maybe for love [The carver and the wood]
 A lot going on
 The modern poet
 Moment of truth
 Mr. Holmes's brother
 My father's silence
 On a magazine picture of a mass burial
 Out of the room
 The oyster [The oyster as art]
 The pains of poetry
 Photograph of Robert Frost
 Plain girl: Sunday noon
 Portrait [Biography]
 A prayer on the night before Easter [Prayer on the night before Easter]
 Re-arrangements
 Remembering you, long after
 The room
 The secret
 The Somerset Dam for supper
 To my mother
 Dog in the house
 The sickle
 It says in the book
 Poem number three ninety three
 Instead of albums
 The library: capitol of the world
 The Murdock saga
 Incoming mail [I can manage multiplicity]
 The good guys and the bad guys
 The ballad of Albert Woolson
 [Untitled]
 Poor Johnny roll
 The pipe which I was gave by Santa Claus
 Man as bear
 My old schools
 The thrifty elephant
 Do I not rage?
 For Sam Moses, printer
 Alight on the hill
 Time and my father's cousin
 The poet
 Billingham street [Our street]
 Biography
 Books
 Love poems
 [Untitled]
 [Untitled]
 Bird pavilion
 On the twenty second anniversary
 The crisis at Valley Forge, 1931
 Contradictions in an ultimate spring
 Any next year
 Cultivator
 Talk
 Weathermen
 Overheard
 To be forty
 Something out there
 Letter to S.V.B. [Stephen Vincent Benet] [Dear Steve]
 Thoughts on beginning another shaving stick
 Group photograph
 Program note [Three P's presents...]
 Goodbye to the campus
 Let the joyful speak [Your kind of joy]
 The fence
 Spring on the Hill
 Letter about weather
 The source
 The praise of poetry
 For Charles Gott [Lament for the dead] [The inconsolable]
 Boy reading
 The old professor
 The rewards of teaching
 Faculty counselor [In the dean's office]
 Teaching program
 In a classroom
 The name
 Somebody's bad luck
 The spiral
 The sword &
 A taste for revenge
 Teacher retired to Maine
 The thought
 Time no time
 To the girls formerly of Sigma Kappa at Tufts University and Cornell University
 To the gurnet
 True murder's course
 King Richard seventh
 The valley
 The wind in the elm trees
 A wish
 The word heart
 World the way it is
 Dream
 Figure of speech
 For D.H.
 I can never be alone
 In cities
 Interior
 Young man's poem
 Tireless testament [Testament]
 The chest of time
 Brother to brother, 1859
 The phoenix promise
 At a country fair
 Fable
 In danger safely
 Aware of legends
 Diver
 Death in the back yard
 The expectation [Expectations]
 O Lord of stars and sunlight
 Lady is a lady
 The long walk alone [Renewal]
 Odd moment
 The good, the great, the wise
 The secret tide
 The mountain farm
 An old song with a new refrain
 Penny for your thoughts
 Portrait two
 Street scene
 The summer after
 Remembered nights
 Moonrise
 Nine o'clock
 Once in August
 The time is good
 The winter
 The apple
 Voices in a new world
 The woman who would not close her eyes
 Green things growing
 Death of a leaf
 Come and play
 Moment
 Fears
 He knows it is safe
 Is calm the thing?
 Maybe tomorrow
 Not you like music
 O Time!
 On finding certain lines marked in Santayana's sonnets
 Plainly said
 Prayer for to-morrow
 Sonnet to a friend twice my age
 Things I love
 Wars that rage: sonnet
 The watcher in the street
 Weave a circle round him
 Young promise
 Page in a diary: For Doris to remember the day by
 Pain I gave you
 A penny poem
 Perfectly deathless poem to Betty Rosenthal from John Holmes on receiving a necktie
 Photographer's Sunday
 Plato's table
 Poem for my 32nd birthday
 Poetry [Living for poetry]
 Whatever winds
 Reflection of a shadow
 The responsibilities
 Rhyme of going to the store [Going to the store]
 Shake well, throw away
 Should I?
 Sky once more
 Some in dreams
 Song
 Sonnet to a dancing-partner
 Sort of spring song, with ah!
 So you will know
 Spring: a sermon [The double root]
 Spring morning
 Subject for a poem
 Suddenly birds
 Sword on the wall
 Take a lot of people
 The tall men
 The Passing king
 To one I dislike
 A thing to say
 Time's noise
 ...To a desert island
 Advice
 Against growing old
 Average reader
 Belladonna
 Big girl now
 Book-review
 Bumps in the night
 Children try
 Clouds on a summer night
 Country quiet remembered
 Curse
 Deep shore
 Dorothy
 The druids
 At night
 Epitaph for Peter if he should die
 Essay of saints
 Examination
 An exercise in humility
 Ezra Pound
 The face
 Wings
 Four friends
 Gathering poem [Your move]
 Golden egg
 Hullaballou
 Holy Ballou
 Hello Ballou
 Hail Ballou
 The hamlet
 Hearing them speak
 His dazzled look [The look]
 How do I love thee?
 To a friend too kind
 To be tacked on the bulletin board at any writers' conference
 To Isabel with some poems
 Twenty eight Billingham Street
 Two men talking
 Understandable poem
 The visiting poets
 Cal Lowell [The visiting poets]
 We are waiting
 Wherever you lie
 [Untitled]
 Window
 Word from the west
 Words are so exciting
 The young men speaking
 [Untitled]
 Hush
 I do it myself [I always did]
 In a dark wood
 A kind of silence
 Ladies and gentlemen ...
 Last night
 Letter to a young poet
 Letters: a metaphor
 A long poem entitled 'I love the Hillside Hardware & Paint Co.'
 First love recalled
 A man who came home late at night
 Margaret
 Music to me
 My pasenger [My passenger]
 My wife's grandfather's ring
 New name
 New woman in the house
 Next year's music
 No more music
 One act play
 One beautiful moment
 Love-child
 The cottage of broken dreams
 Woodrow-Wilson was-a-hero
 Open letter [Maybe you]
 Preface
 Winter solstice
 Look east, look west
 The weight
 Past understanding
 A station in the journey
 Interruption
 1918: Armistice
 The change
 [Untitled]
 [Untitled]
 [Untitled]
 [Untitled]
 [Untitled]
 [Untitled]
 [Untitled]
 [Untitled]
 [Untitled]
 Historical event
 All the dead and some poets
 The world in my time [The world in my own time]
 Whose name was writ in water
 Warning
 Primitive
 Totem
 Slow child
 This time surely
 Portrait: My wife
 The island
 You have an interesting mind
 The world is one
 A man's world
 Child: Spring
 Cook's tour
 A room with books [Room with books]
 Far enough
 Hat weather
 The late Mr. Thorpe
 Looking at books
 A natural law
 First day
 Being young
 Fable with no moral
 Mornings at eleven
 The bookworm turns
 A sweet hope once
 Sweetly solemn thought
 Those were the days
 Table for one
 Work in progress
 The critic on the pan
 Dinner for eight
 The miserable gardener
 Good-night! Good-night!
 Letter to three men
 Political strategy
 To my teachers
 Notes for a history of sleep
 Thinker in bed
 [Untitled]
 [Untitled]
 Design for a skyscraper
 Problem father
 Wallpaper poem
 The double life
 Fair warning
 This one is father
 [Untitled]
 Incredulous
 A year after
 [Untitled]
 Ode for the hundredth birthday of William Upham
 [Untitled]
 Peter sleeping
 Epitaph for any New Yorker
 Peter reads far into the night
 Letter from an exile
 Usually
 The blessing
 Nineteen fifty one
 Old cheese and cold beer
 What the book salesman said
 Words enough
 Do you remember
 The hunted
 Tomorrow you
 Ballad of some of the boys
 The talking mirror
 Color
 The day's news
 What we hate most
 The snow-child
 For Karl Magnus Armens
 Boy at four
 Hummingbird and seagull
 The extent of his acres
 To remember one another
 All's well that ends
 John Holmes, his book
 The chance
 Lesson in the monkey-house
 The title-page
 Faculty and administration section
 The senior class section
 The activities section
 The organizations section
 The fraternities section
 Ode for scene 1, 'Hullaballou'
 Poetry defined
 On a cage of mice brought home for the week of school vacation
 Nothing odd
 Free will and fire-truck
 Verses in a very old tradition
 The stone
 The spring sun
 The fifty-first
 Overheard
 A prayer
 Evening meal in the twentieth century
 A little night-wording