Candles
The days of the future stand in front of us
Like a line of candles all alight—
Golden and warm and lively little candles.
The days that are past are left behind,
A mournful row of candles that are out;
The nearer ones are still smoking,
Candles cold, and melted, candles bent,
I don’t want to see them; their shapes hurt me,
It hurts me to remember the light of them at first.
I look before me at my lighted candles,
I don’t want to turn around and see with horror
How quickly the dark line is lengthening,
How quickly the candles multiply that have been put out.
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Recent Posts
- post #5, concluding the Preface to my book in progress, _Upcycling Ecopoetry_
- post #4 in the series, from the preface to my book in progress, Upcycling Ecopoetry
- post #3 in the series, from my book in progress Upcycling Ecopoetry
- Post #2 in the series, from the preface to Upcycling Ecopoetry
- Post #1 in a series, all from the preface of my book in progress, _Upcycling Ecopoetry_
Recent Comments
- ankara bo?anma avukat? on On the Game of Thrones title sequence
- Fireborn on Some Reasons Why Daenerys Targaryen’s Character Is Even Better in Game of Thrones Than in Song of Ice and Fire
- Daniel Bosch on Daniel Bosch on Daisy Fried’s poem “Torment”
- Amy on What Should I Do With the Dead Turk in the Bedroom? Class, Sex, and Otherness in Downton Abbey
- Rahul Shayar on On the Game of Thrones title sequence
Pages
- About Me
- Akwete Weave poetry chapbook
- Digital Humanities Projects
- Ecotone // poems by Peter Schmidt // wondering through the natural world …
- Engl 009H “Portraits of the Artist” — an introduction to literary and cultural studies for first-year students.
- English 116 American Literature Honors Seminar, Fall 2014: the Literature of the U.S. South
- English 52A (U.S. Fiction, 1900-1950)
- English 52B, U.S. Fiction 1945 to the Present. Swarthmore College, Fall 2017.
- English 53: Modern American Poetry
- English 53R: Advanced Research Topics in U.S. Literature
- English 71B: The Lyric Poem in English (Fall 2013)
- English 71D: The Short Story in the U.S. (Fall 2018)
- Online Essays
- Pocketa Pocketas (pulses & pips of poems)
- Publications
- “Truth so mazed”: Faulkner and U.S. Plantation Fiction
- A review-essay on William Carlos Williams’ _By Word of Mouth: Poems from the Spanish, 1916-1959_
- A selection of older print and digital scholarly work
- On Eros Crossing the Color-Line in William Faulkner and Margaret Mitchell
- On Optimists’ Sons and Daughters: Eudora Welty’s The Optimist’s Daughter and Peter Taylor’s A Summons to Memphis
- Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus
- The “Raftsmen’s Passage,” Huck’s Crisis of Whiteness, and _Huckleberry Finn_ in U.S. Literary History
- Selected Courses
- SPLEEN poetry chapbook: pissed-off poems for a pissant age.
- Very Large Array // a poetry collage project by Peter Schmidt (1990-2000)
- Very Large Array project
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