[Skip Navigation]

Poetry Archives

A continuing selection of classic and contemporary poems.

To E H K, On The Receipt Of A Familiar Poem

Paul Laurence Dunbar

To me, like hauntings of a vagrant breath
  From some far forest which I once have known,
  The perfume of this flower of verse is blown.
Tho’ seemingly soul-blossoms faint to death,
Naught that with joy she bears e’er withereth.
  So, tho’ the pregnant years have come and flown,
Lives come and gone and altered like mine own,
This poem comes to me a shibboleth:
Brings sound of past communings to my ear,
  Turns round the tide of time and bears me back
  Along an old and long untraversed way;
Makes me forget this is a later year,
  Makes me tread o’er a reminiscent track,
    Half sad, half glad, to one forgotten day!
Online text © 1998-2010 Poetry X. All rights reserved.
From The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar | Dodd, Mead And Company, 1922
Add Keyword Tags

Separate each tag with a space. You may add as many tags as you'd like to each poem.

What are tags?
Tags, sometimes called “folksonomies,” are words that describe or categorize a poem, like “20th century modernism” or “Italian sonnet”. Tags can help you find poems that have something in common, based on how other people classify them.

More Info

This site will work and look better in a browser that supports web standards, but it is accessible to any Internet device.