That Sweet Flute John Clare

Portrait of Mary Oliver
Mary Oliver 1935–2019

That sweet flute John Clare; that broken branch Eddy Whitman; Christopher Smart, in the press of blazing electricity; My uncle the suicide; Woolf, on her way to the river; Wolf, of the sorrowful songs; Swift, impenetrable mask of Dublin; Schumann, climbing the bridge, leaping into the Rhine; Ruskin, Cowper; Poe, rambling in the gloom-bins of Baltimore and Richmond--

light of the world, hold me

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