sw00021i-my.poems

Some Information About My Poems


Saplings is not a real or even projected book
                but is simply a heading for poems I
wrote early in my life (1953 into 1963).  I cannot
say the following list is inclusive, but I can say
I cannot find a number of the poems listed, even
though several were important to me at the time.  I
especially miss the Lyrielle sonnet-sequence and the
first two solitude sonnets, but I rather suspect my
having as many as I do is unusual.  I should try to
be satisfied, but it is in my head that some of the
missing poems were examples of my best efforts in 
the years before I wrote "Symphony".
-
(1953 through 1959)          m = missing
"The God-Created Milky Way" (1953-my first)
"My Mother" and "Mother"
"On Love of Nature" (m)
"Treasure" (a cinquain) 
"I Dream of Life"
"I Could Be a Poet"
"Too Young"
"Light of Love"
"Nature and the Goal"
"The Mystic Dove" (original version a later poem)
"The Red-Breasted Messenger" (even though it's not)
"Each Man"
"Indian Sue" (may have been about a doll) 
"An Easter Verse" (now: "Written in a Card") 
"Profound Depths" (m)
"I Met Cicero Prologue" and "I Met Cicero Epilogue" (m)
"Spring Song" (m)
"The Greatest Love" (m)
"Solitudo I" and "Solitudo II" (m)
"Winter Winds" (1958-is in my First Pick)
"His Goal Was Peace" (about Abraham Lincoln)
"Woodland Shades" (preparatory) 
"Woodland Shades" (first sonnet-it was twice published)
"Tom of the Woods" (first ballad)
"Triton" (1959-is in my First Pick)

(in 1960)
"Climbing the Hill"
"The Fourfold Chariot Prologue"
"Into the Marsh" (published in Marquette Journal)
"The Song of Southern Africa for Freedom"
"Away, Away" (first version)
"Ode to the March Winds"
"To the February Snows"
"Solitudo III" (published in Marquette Journal)
"The Victory Spirit"
"Love"
"The Scourging"
"All Is Spring"
"Prologue to Elegies on Spiritual Life"
"To a Raindrop"
"In Simple Silence"
"Prison Break"
"As Evening Dies" (first version)
"Gray Heavy"
"Pastoral Death"
"The Meeting"
"The Light"

(in 1961)
"The Lone Pine"
"Glen Iris"
"Aerual Elegy on Spiritual Life"
"Spiriel Elegy on Spiritual Life"
"Manuol Elegy on Spiritual Life"
"Epilogue to Elegies on Spiritual Life"
"The Search"
"Untainted Ewe" (just blame Gerard Manley Hopkins)
"The Wind in the Willows"
"O My God"
"Responsio" (a poem in Latin)
"To a Lifeless Leaf"
"Way Marsh"
"Morning Creation"
"Dream-Winds"
"The Gush of Spring"
"Lines Written in Reflection on the
  Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament"
"Replenish Us"
"To God and Gardeners"
"And so it was"
"Emmanuel"
"Behind the Silent Walls"

(in 1962)
"On the Feast of St. Agnes"
"Vernaltime"
"Ode to the Mid-Month" (first version)
"Lines Composed in Meditation"
"An Empty Town"
"Jesus Bound--Part I"
"As Evening Dies" (revision)
"Away, Away" (revision)
"The Mourning Dove" (revision)
"Opposites of Love"
"Need It Be?"
"To Poets"
"Poets of Our Age"
"The Blood of Martyrs"
"Slowly the Dead-Fall Troops"
"A Meditation: Colloquy on Poetry"
"Twin Mountains" (m)
"My Moldau" (m)
"Going North" (m)
"The More I Die"
"In My Life"
"Only Man, with Christ"
"Bounds of Love"
"In"
"To Father Purcell, S.J."
"Skyscrapers"
"Reflections Upon Looking at My Baby Picture"
"Selfishness"
"The Plumb"
"Lyrielle" and "Lyrielle II" and "Lyrielle III" (m)
"When Virgin Verse"
"An Humble Garden Fills the Lover's Emptiness"
"A Nightingale Ensnared"
"The Loved Ones Are a Sea of Death"
"Song of an Unfaithful Lover"
"We Are Men of the Prairie"
"Credo"
"Death"
"The Park" (a prose poem)
"Sonnet of a Maker"
"To John Keats" (sonnet "285. October 11th"
  in my most ambitious work, 1976)
"Sonnet to Shakespeare" ("284. October 10th")
"Sophia" (m)
"An Ancient Farmer I Met on the Road"
"To Father"
"Since Life Needs Love"
"To Us in All"
"The Tree Trimmers"
"Cold Are the Dead"
"Exposure"
"God's Power"
"A Vacuum Cleaner Happiness"
"Metal Salad"
"Fragment of Onefor"
  (an unfinished epic later retitled Justan Tamarind)
"A Mysterious Fragment"
"Weave a Background"
"The Newsboy"
"Ode to an Autumn Day"
"Soliloquy in Autumn"
"The Newsboy's Song"
"So Real Does Verse"

(into 1963)
"Some untitled verses for I Am a Man"
"Man Rules Man"
"Come Now with Me"
"I Give Myself" (later retitled "Lyrielle IV") (m)
"We Are Angleworms"
"A Man"
"Lyrielle V" and "Lyrielle VI" (m)
"She is a Tree"
"Love's Pressure and Color"
"Zoorape"

-
(I have a sense that more than a few of these titles 
are better than the poems beneath them.)
-


Brian A. J. Salchert