Poetry: Robert Frost, Rainer Maria Rilke, & Langston Hughes

I just love poetry – and not so much to read to myself but to read aloud with others. Here’s a classic American poem and one of my personal favorites “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost (be sure to read it until the end):

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

Here’s a wrenchingly romantic quote from “Letters To A Young Poet” by the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke:

Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.

And this poignant verse by American poet Langston Hughes from the poem “A Dream Deferred.”  Lorraine Hansbury wrote a play “A Raisin In The Sun,” which is now on Broadway, after being inspired by that line in this beautiful Langston Hughes poem.

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore—

And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over—

like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags

like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?