By Stephen Vincent Benét

My mind’s a map. A mad sea-captain drew it   
Under a flowing moon until he knew it;
Winds with brass trumpets, puffy-cheeked as jugs,   
And states bright-patterned like Arabian rugs.   
“Here there be tygers.” “Here we buried Jim.”   
Here is the strait where eyeless fishes swim   
About their buried idol, drowned so cold   
He weeps away his eyes in salt and gold.   
A country like the dark side of the moon,   
A cider-apple country, harsh and boon,   
A country savage as a chestnut-rind,
A land of hungry sorcerers.
                                              Your mind?

—Your mind is water through an April night,
A cherry-branch, plume-feathery with its white,   
A lavender as fragrant as your words,   
A room where Peace and Honor talk like birds,   
Sewing bright coins upon the tragic cloth   
Of heavy Fate, and Mockery, like a moth,   
Flutters and beats about those lovely things.   
You are the soul, enchanted with its wings,   
The single voice that raises up the dead   
To shake the pride of angels.
                                                 I have said.

• Living

Poet Bio

Stephen Vincent Benét was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He attended Yale University and published two works of poetry while there, until civilian military service forced him to put his studies on hold for a year. He graduated in 1919, after submitting a third book of poetry as a substitute for a thesis. In 1921 he published his first novel, The Beginning of Wisdom, and traveled to Paris in order to study at the Sorbonne. He returned in 1923 with Rosemary Carr, his new wife. Benét continued to write not just poetry, but novels, short stories, even an opera libretto. He is best known for his epic about the Civil War, John Brown’s Body, which won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1929. See More By This Poet

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