In a poem, Yeats describes both a woman’s beauty and her “pilgrim soul.” Her soul matters most, but her beauty, too. Else the line, “How many loved her moments of glad grace,” wouldn’t have gathered like honey at his nib. In “The Glory Trumpeter” Derek Walcott daubs a ravaged passionate Caribbean jazz man: “Old Eddie's face, wrinkled with river lights, / Looked like a Mississippi man's.”

Poems about others make us doubt our judgments and sift the soil of our own nature. We’ll read poems about the old and young, people at work and in love, and of course the dead. Poets in our packet will include Dickinson, Yeats, Hardy, Milton, Frost, Shelley, Ponsot, and Li-Young Lee.

Don Barkin has degrees from Harvard College and Cambridge University. He has taught seminars for a number of years at Yale and Wesleyan. He has published three books of poetry. He has been a newspaper reporter and school teacher.

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