Poems You Ought to Know. Elia Wilkinson Peattie

Each morning, for several months, The Chicago Tribune has published at the head of its first column, verses under the caption: “Poems You Ought to Know.” It has explained its action by the following quotation from Professor Charles Eliot Norton:

“Whatever your occupation may be, and however crowded your hours with affairs, do not fail to secure at least a few minutes every day for refreshment of your inner life with a bit of poetry.”

By publishing these poems The Tribune hopes to accomplish two things: first, to inspire a love of poetry in the hearts of many of its readers who have never before taken time or thought to read the best poems of this and other centuries and lands; and, secondly, to remind those who once loved song, but forgot it among the louder voices of the world, of the melody that enchanted them in youth.

The title has carried with it its own standard, and the poems have been kept on a plane above jocularity or mere prettiness of versification; rather have they tried to teach the doctrines of courage, of nature-love, of pure and noble melody. It has been the ambition of those selecting the verses to choose something to lift the reader above the “petty round of irritating concerns and duties,” and the object will have been achieved if it has helped anyone to “play the man,” “to go blithely about his business all the day,” with a consciousness of that abounding beauty in the world of thought which is the common property of all men.

No anthology of English verse can be complete, and none can satisfy all. The compiler’s individual taste, tempered and guided by established authority, is almost the only standard. This collection has been compiled not by one but by many thousands, and their selections here appear edited and winnowed as the idea of the series seemed to dictate. The book appears at the wide-spread and almost universal request of those who have watched the bold experiment of a great Twentieth-Century American newspaper giving the place of honor in its columns every day to a selection from the poets.

For permission to reprint certain poems by Longfellow, Lowell, Harte, Hay, Bayard Taylor, Holmes, Whittier, Parsons, and Aldrich, graciously accorded by Houghton, Mifflin & Co., the publishers, thanks are gratefully acknowledged. To Charles Scribner’s Sons, for an extract from Lanier’s poems, and, lastly, to the many thousand readers, who, by their sympathy, appreciation, and help have encouraged the continuance of the daily publication of the poems, similar gratitude is felt.

TO SLEEP.
BY WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.

Table of Contents

William Wordsworth was born in 1770 and died at Rydal Mount in 1850. He was educated in Cambridge, where he graduated in 1791. He traveled on the continent before that, but he settled down for several years in Dorset. A visit from Coleridge determined his career in 1796. He was again abroad in 1798, but returned the following year and went to live at Grasmere in the Lake District. He held severai government positions and was poet laureate from 1843 to his death. His chief works are, “The Evening Walk,” “Descriptive Sketches,” “The Excursion,” “White Doe of Rylston,” “Thanksgiving Ode,” “Peter Bell,” “Waggoner,” “River Duddon,” A Series of Sonnets, “The Borderers,” “Yarrow Revisited,” and “The Prelude.”

A flock of sheep that leisurely pass by

One after one; the sound of rain, and bees

Murmuring; the fall of rivers, winds and seas,

Smooth fields, white sheets of water, and pure sky;

I’ve thought of all by turns, and still I lie

Sleepless; and soon the small birds’ melodies

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Poems You Ought to Know. Elia Wilkinson Peattie

Poems You Ought to Know

INTRODUCTION

TO SLEEP. BY WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.

TO SLEEP.
BY WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.