Tweetspeak Poetry

  • Home
  • FREE prompts
  • Earth Song
  • Every Day Poems—Subscribe! ✨
  • Teaching Tools
  • Books, Etc.
  • Patron Love

By Heart: ‘What Men Die For Lack Of’ + New Christina Rossetti Challenge

By Megan Willome 4 Comments

poky white weed

What Men Die for Lack Of

Lately I’ve found myself consuming less and less news, which is a radical departure for me.  When I was a child, public policy was my father’s job, so politics was often dinner table conversation. But right now I prefer to steep in other things, the kinds of things “men die miserably every day for lack of” — poems.

What if we inhaled poetry the way we consume up-to-the minute news? What if we took it on a schedule, like medicine? It might not keep us from dying but it might make us less miserable.

Summer is generally not my happiest season, but this year a friend gifted me with Abigail Carroll’s collection Habitation of Wonder. It was like having Valentine’s Day in August. This poem caught my eye because of the title and epigraph, drawn from “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” by William Carlos Williams.

The poem’s first line comes from Wordsworth. But what about the next? And the next?

What Men Die For Lack Of

It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there. – William Carlos Williams

Daffodils—ten thousand at a glance.
A globed fruit, palpable and mute.
Pockets full of lichens and seeds.
Apple-bent mossed cottage trees.
Lamb-white days, a lilting house.
Winnings risked on pitch and toss.
Boatmens’ songs, mechanics’ songs.
Rose moles on the skin of trout.
A cherry hung with bloom, a cherry hung with snow.
The flow of Julia’s silks, the liquefaction of her clothes.
An angel robed in real linen, spun on a definite loom.
Bald and wild, the O-gape of the moon.
Telephone poles holding out their arms to birds.
A hammock, a field of sunlight between two pines.
Nine bean rows and nine and fifty swans.
A leaping tongue of bloom spared by a scythe.
Magenta pokeweed sprung in a vacant lot.
The oily, rainbowed deck of a rented boat.
White chickens, a red wheelbarrow glazed with rain.
Marbles and puddles and whistling far and wee.
Truth told slant, truth that dazzles gradually.

– Abigail Carroll

Each line of Carroll’s poem is a line that nods to a line (or lines) from another poem. On my first reading I guessed a few of them, but not all. I won’t give you the key because part of the fun is matching line to poem and poet. I wrote out a cheat sheet that links each line with the poet who originally wrote it, and that helped my stroll down memorization lane.

Two of the lines reference poems I have previously learned By Heart, the Wordsworth one and one from William Butler Yeats. Some lines are by poets who have written other poems I’ve memorized, so their words sounded somewhat familiar, including Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, John Keats, Robert Herrick, William Carlos Williams (the good doctor, himself), and Walt Whitman. Other poets I could recognize from coming across their “news” in my general poetry diet: Gerard Manley Hopkins, Mary Oliver, Carl Sandburg, and Robert Louis Stevenson. The rest surprised me. (I love poem surprises.)

Less news-reading has meant more poetry-writing, especially while reading Carroll’s collection. I even wrote my own ‘Make Me’ poem in response to hers. Without news cycle tyranny, I’ve been more free to notice what’s around me and to turn that into poems. To dwell a bit more in wonder.

https://soundcloud.com/megan-willome/what-men-die-for-lack-of-by-abigail-carroll

By Heart for September

For the next By Heart gathering, September 24, we’ll learn “Somewhere or Other” by Christina Rossetti.

Somewhere or Other

Somewhere or other there must surely be
The face not seen, the voice not heard,
The heart that not yet—never yet—ah me!
Made answer to my word.

Somewhere or other, may be near or far;
Past land and sea, clean out of sight;
Beyond the wandering moon, beyond the star
That tracks her night by night.

Somewhere or other, may be far or near;
With just a wall, a hedge, between;
With just the last leaves of the dying year
Fallen on a turf grown green.

– Christina Rossetti

Photo by Jason Trbovich, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Megan Willome.

Browse more By Heart 

MW-Joy of Poetry Front cover 367 x 265

5 star

I loved this book. As soon as I finished, I began reading it again.”

—David Lee Garrison, author of Playing Bach in the D. C. Metro

Buy The Joy of Poetry Now

  • Author
  • Recent Posts
Megan Willome
Megan Willome
Megan Willome is a writer, editor, and author of The Joy of Poetry: How to Keep, Save & Make Your Life With Poems and Rainbow Crow: poems in and out of form. Her day is incomplete without poetry, tea, and a walk in the dark.
Megan Willome
Latest posts by Megan Willome (see all)
  • Perspective: The Two, The Only: Calvin and Hobbes - December 16, 2022
  • Children’s Book Club: A Very Haunted Christmas - December 9, 2022
  • By Heart: ‘The night is darkening round me’ by Emily Brontë - December 2, 2022

Filed Under: A Poem in Every Heart, Blog, By Heart, Carl Sandburg, Christina Rossetti, Emily Dickinson, John Keats, Mary Oliver, Robert Frost, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sylvia Plath, W. B. Yeats, Walt Whitman

Try Every Day Poems...

About Megan Willome

Megan Willome is a writer, editor, and author of The Joy of Poetry: How to Keep, Save & Make Your Life With Poems and Rainbow Crow: poems in and out of form. Her day is incomplete without poetry, tea, and a walk in the dark.

Comments

  1. L.L. Barkat says

    August 27, 2021 at 9:31 am

    Wonderful!

    This question. Everyone might put it on their fridge (or their screens 😉 …

    “What if we inhaled poetry the way we consume up-to-the minute news?”

    Reply
    • Megan Willome says

      August 27, 2021 at 11:05 am

      William Carlos Williams was onto something.

      Reply
  2. Bethany R. says

    August 29, 2021 at 4:28 pm

    I love these two lines of Rosetti’s poem:

    “Somewhere or other, may be far or near;
    With just a wall, a hedge, between;”

    Hope-inducing. Perhaps what we hope for is just—
    over there

    Also reminds me of this wonderful animated series my daughter and I discovered and watched during this pandemic season. Artful, quirky, funny (we burst out laughing a couple times), odd, touch-of-spooky, and kinda wonderful. “Over the Garden Wall” <3

    Reply
    • Megan Willome says

      August 29, 2021 at 5:50 pm

      Ooh, I don’t know that one!

      I liked those lines too. I’d read them looking at the fence around my backyard, thinking about hope.

      Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Take How to Read a Poem

Get the Introduction, the Billy Collins poem, and Chapter 1

get the sample now

Welcome to Tweetspeak

New to Tweetspeak Poetry? Start here, in The Mischief Café. You're a regular? Check out our May Menu

Patron Love

❤️

Welcome a little patron love, when you help keep the world poetic.

The Graphic Novel

"Stunning, heartbreaking, and relevant illustrations"

Callie Feyen, teacher

read a summary of The Yellow Wallpaper

meet The Yellow Wallpaper characters

How to Write Poetry

Your Comments

  • Glynn on World War II Had Its Poets, Too
  • Sandra Fox Murphy on World War II Had Its Poets, Too
  • Glynn on Poets and Poems: Kelly Belmonte and “The Mother of All Words”
  • Bethany R. on Poets and Poems: Kelly Belmonte and “The Mother of All Words”

Featured In

We're happy to have been featured in...

The Huffington Post

The Paris Review

The New York Observer

Tumblr Book News

Stay in Touch With Us

Categories

Learn to Write Form Poems

How to Write an Acrostic

How to Write a Ballad

How to Write a Catalog Poem

How to Write a Ghazal

How to Write a Haiku

How to Write an Ode

How to Write a Pantoum

How to Write a Rondeau

How to Write a Sestina

How to Write a Sonnet

How to Write a Villanelle

5 FREE POETRY PROMPTS

Get 5 FREE inbox poetry prompts from the popular book How to Write a Poem

Shakespeare Resources

Poetry Classroom: Sonnet 18

Common Core Picture Poems: Sonnet 73

Sonnet 104 Annotated

Sonnet 116 Annotated

Character Analysis: Romeo and Juliet

Character Analysis: Was Hamlet Sane or Insane?

Why Does Hamlet Wait to Kill the King?

10 Fun Shakespeare Resources

About Shakespeare: Poet and Playwright

Top 10 Shakespeare Sonnets

See all 154 Shakespeare sonnets in our Shakespeare Library!

Explore Work From Black Poets

About Us

  • • A Blessing for Writers
  • • Our Story
  • • Meet Our Team
  • • Literary Citizenship
  • • Poet Laura
  • • Poetry for Life: The 5 Vital Approaches
  • • T. S. Poetry Press – All Books
  • • Contact Us

Write With Us

  • • 5 FREE Poetry Prompts-Inbox Delivery
  • • 30 Days to Richer Writing Workshop
  • • Poetry Prompts
  • • Submissions
  • • The Write to Poetry

Read With Us

  • • All Our Books
  • • Book Club
  • • Every Day Poems—Subscribe! ✨
  • • Literacy Extras
  • • Poems to Listen By: Audio Series
  • • Poet-a-Day
  • • Poets and Poems
  • • 50 States Projects
  • • Charlotte Perkins Gilman Poems Library
  • • Edgar Allan Poe Poems Arts & Experience Library
  • • William Blake Poems Arts & Experience Library
  • • William Shakespeare Sonnet Library

Celebrate With Us

  • • Poem on Your Pillow Day
  • • Poetic Earth Month
  • • Poet in a Cupcake Day
  • • Poetry at Work Day
  • • Random Acts of Poetry Day
  • • Take Your Poet to School Week
  • • Take Your Poet to Work Day

Gift Ideas

  • • Every Day Poems
  • • Our Shop
  • • Everybody Loves a Book!

Connect

  • • Donate
  • • Blog Buttons
  • • By Heart
  • • Shop for Tweetspeak Fun Stuff

Copyright © 2025 Tweetspeak Poetry · FAQ, Disclosure & Privacy Policy