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Carl Sandburg
Napoleon shifted,
Restless in the old sarcophagus
And murmured to a watchguard :
"Who goes there?"
" Twenty-one million men.
Soldiers, armies, guns,
Twenty-one million
Afoot, horseback.
In the air.
Under the sea."
And Napoleon turned to his sleep :
" It is not my world answering ;
It is some dreamer who knows not
The world I marched in
From Calais to Moscow."
And he slept on
Shall I write pretty poetry
Controlled by ordered sense in me
With an old choice of figure and of word,
So call my soul a nesting bird?
Of the dead poets I can make a synthesis,
And learn poetic form that in them is;
But I will use the figure that is real
For me, the figure that I feel.
And now of this matter of ear-perfect rhyme,
My clerk can list all language in his leisure time;
A faulty rhyme may be a well-placed microtone,
And hold a perfect imperfection of its own.
A poet rediscovers all creation;
His instinct gives him beauty, which is sensed relation.
It was as fit for one man's thoughts to trot in iambs, as it is for me.