• Marianne Moore

    I May, I Might, I Must

    If you tell me why the fen
    appears impassable, I then
    will tell you why I think that I
    can get across it if I try.

  • Sarah Teasdale

    I Am Not Yours

    I am not yours, not lost in you,
    Not lost, although I long to be
    Lost as a candle lit at noon,
    Lost as a snowflake in the sea.

    You love me, and I find you still
    A spirit beautiful and bright,
    Yet I am I, who long to be
    Lost as a light is lost in light.

    Oh plunge me deep in love — put out
    My senses, leave me deaf and blind,
    Swept by the tempest of your love,
    A taper in a rushing wind.

  • Cary Grant

    Old Cary Grant fine, how you?


    In reply to a telegram to his agent asking “How old Cary Grant?”

  • on David Hilbert

    Hilbert […] was perhaps the most absent-minded man who ever lived. He was a great friend of the physicist James Franck. One day when Hilbert was walking in the street he met James Franck and he said, “James, is your wife as mean as mine?” Well, Franck was taken aback by this statement and didn’t know quite what to say, and he said, “Well, what has your wife done?” And Hilbert said, “It was only this morning that I discovered quite by accident that my wife does not give me an egg for breakfast. Heaven knows how long this has been going on.”

  • Jeffrey Bernard

    Sir, I have been commissioned by Michael Joseph to write an autobiography and I would be grateful to any of your readers who could tell me what I was doing between 1960 to 1974

    A letter from Jeffrey Bernard in the New Statesman 18 July 1975

  • Simon Armitage

    The Catch

    Forget
    the long smouldering
    afternoon. It is

    this moment
    when the ball scoots
    of the edge

    of the bat; upwards,
    backwards, falling
    seemingly

    beyond him
    yet he reaches
    and picks it

    out
    of its loop
    like

    an apple
    from a branch,
    the first of the season.

  • Becky Dennison Sakellariou

    Math Is Beautiful and So Are You

    If n is an even number
    then I’ll kiss you goodnight right here,
    but if the modulus k is the unique solution,
    I’ll take you in my arms for the long night.

    When the properties are constrained as well as incomplete,
    I’ll be getting off the train at this stop.
    However, if there is some positive constant,
    then I’ll stay on board for a while longer.

    When it says that the supremum deviates from the least zero,
    my heart closes off.
    But if all moments are infinite and you can hear me,
    I will open out for you.

    This sequence satisfies the hypothesis of uniformity,
    and because we know that approximation is possible
    and that inequality is an embedding factor,
    come, let’s try once more.

  • Ogden Nash

    My Dream

    This is my dream,
    It is my own dream,
    I dreamt it.
    I dreamt that my hair was kempt.
    Then I dreamt that my true love unkempt it.

  • Gelett Burgess

    If in the last few years you haven’t discarded a major opinion or aquired a new one, check your pulse. You may be dead.

  • John Keats

    On first looking into Chapman’s Homer

    Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,
    And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
    Round many western islands have I been
    Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
    Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
    That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;
    Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
    Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
    Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
    When a new planet swims into his ken;
    Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
    He star’d at the Pacific – and all his men
    Look’d at each other with a wild surmise-
    Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

  • Wendy Cope

    I Worry

    I worry about you –
    So long since we spoke.
    Love, are you downhearted,
    Dispirited, broke?

    I worry about you.
    I can’t sleep at night.
    Are you sad? Are you lonely?
    Or are you all right?

    They say that men suffer,
    As badly, as long.
    I worry, I worry,
    In case they are wrong.