The Changing Light by L. Ferlinghetti

The poetic description of the changing light of San Francisco is soft, mellow, airy. One of the poet's late works, it evokes the calm after the storm. Vernacular ("...is none of..") and yet precise ("scrim"), the poem eventually settles on Greece--the cradle of modern western civilization--as having light which is similar to San Francisco's: an island light that creates sharp dark shadows. The poet's gaze cast eastward, he overlooks the east coast of the US and Paris, France to settle on Greece. Oh, the soup we could make with those allusions! But instead, let's consider the gentle motion of the fog, like clockwork, rolling in at night and burned off by late morning. By mid-afternoon, the wind picks up; then, it is soon evening, and the "city lights" begin to twinkle. And the poet is aware of having made history, yet the whole city drifts, as in a dream, "anchorless over the ocean," in search of direction.

Howl by Allen Ginsberg

I've read that it is impossible to underestimate the influence that Ginsberg's Howl has exerted on American poetry over the last 50 years since it was first written. I believe it was Galway Kinnell who said that Howl changed poetry's concern with meter to a preoccupation with breath. Howl marked a watershed moment in American verse. The breath required to read each line is substantial; in the recording on poets.org the effort that Ginsberg makes is audibly discernible, marked by longish pauses, slight coughs, and occasional deep breaths. Of course, Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed" provided Ginsberg with a historical model.

A Letter in October by Ted Kooser

Kooser's poem plays lovingly with light, darkness, reflections, time, nature, and art. Four stanzas of 6 lines each, 36 lines. Unrhymed, and rhythmically mostly enjambed tetrameters. We are in October, and the speaker is up at dawn, usually, reflecting on the morning. His image too reflects in the window pane since "dawn comes later and later now." His field of vision dwindles rapidly--he once enjoyed early morning nature scenes, but now can see no more than his own reflection in the window pane beyond which is the darkness of night. Light and dark are not absolutes, but rather form a continuum to which the speaker is witness, and a participant. His face appears "pale and odd, / startled by time." And now that it is fall (the autumn of life), the speaker is forced to look inwards (reflect) instead of look out at nature. The poem uses simple language to describe natural scenes that seem imbued with the sparkle and awe of magical realism; and maps the contours of the speaker's life within the framework of the four ages (seasons) of man. We sense the genuineness of the speaker's discovery, its freshness, while at the same time recognize the signs of his dawning awareness of his own mortality.