"That's what misery is, Nothing to have at heart. It is to have or nothing.It is a thing to have, A lion, an ox in his breast, To feel it breathing there.Corazon, stout dog, Young ox, bow-legged bear, He tastes its blood, not spit.He is like a man In the body of a violent beast. Its muscles are his own...The lion sleeps in the sun. Its nose is on its paws. It can kill a man."

"Out of a thing believed, a thing affirmed: The form on the pillow humming while one sleeps, The aureole above the humming house... It can never be satisfied, the mind, never."

"One thing remaining, infallible, would be Enough."

"After the final no there comes a yes And on that yes the future world depends. No was the night. Yes is this present sun."

"His petty syllabi, the sounds that stick, Inevitably modulating, in the blood. And war for war, each has its gallant kind. How simply the fictive hero becomes the real; How gladly with proper words the solider dies, If he must, or lives on the bread of faithful speech."

"With six meats and twelve wines or else without To walk another room...Monsieur and comrade, The soldier is poor without the poet’s lines."

"The meeting of their shadows or that meet In a book in a barrack, a letter from Malay. But your war ends. And after it you return"

"Yet it depends on yours. The two are one. They are a plural, a right and left, a pair, Two parallels that meet if only in"

"Soldier, there is a war between the mind And sky, between thought and day and night. It is For that the poet is always in the sun, Patches the moon together in his room To his Virgilian cadences, up down, Up down. It is a war that never ends."

"They will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne. We shall return at twilight from the lecture Pleased that the irrational is rational,Until flicked by feeling, in a gildered street, I call you by name, my green, my fluent mundo."

"You remain the more than natural figure. You Become the soft-footed phantom, the irrationalDistortion, however fragrant, however dear. That’s it: the more than rational distortion, The fiction that results from feeling. Yes, that."

"Fat girl, terrestrial, my summer, my night, How is it I find you in difference, see you there In a moving contour, a change not quite completed? You are familiar yet an aberration."

"Perhaps, The man-hero is not the exceptional monster, But he that of repetition is most master."

"A thing final in itself and, therefore, good: One of the vast repetitions final in Themselves and, therefore, good, the going round And round and round, the merely going round, Until merely going round is a final good, The way wine comes at a table in a wood."

"I can Do all that angels can. I enjoy like them, Like men besides, like men in light secluded, Enjoying angels."

"These external regions, what do we fill them with Except reflections"

"There is a month, a year, there is a time In which majesty is a mirror of the self: I have not but I am and as I am, I am."

"Is it he or is it I that experience this?"

"What am I to believe? If the angel in his cloud, Serenely gazing at the violent abyss, Plucks on his strings to pluck abysmal glory, Leaps downward through evening’s revelations, and On his spredden wings, needs nothing but deep space, Forgets the gold centre, the golden destiny,Grows warm in the motionless motion of his flight, Am I that imagine this angel less-satisfied? Are the wings his, the lapis-haunted air?"

"But to impose is not To discover. To discover an order as of A season, to discover summer and know it, To discover winter and know it well, to find Not to impose, not to have reasoned at all, Out of nothing to have come on major weather,It is possible, possible, possible. It must Be possible. It must be that in time The real will from its crude compoundings come,Seeming at first, a beast disgorged, unlike, Warmed by a desperate milk. To find the real, To be stripped of every fiction except one,The fiction of an absolute — Angel, Be silent in your luminous cloud and hear The luminous melody of proper sound."

"He imposes orders as he thinks of them, As the fox and snake do. It is a brave affair."

"Straight to the utmost crown of night he flew. The nothingness was a nakedness, a pointBeyond which thought could not progress as thought. He had to choose. But it was not a choice Between excluding things. It was not a choiceBetween, but of. He chose to include the things That in each other are included, the whole, The complicate, the amassing harmony."

"The nothingness was a nakedness, a point,Beyond which fact could not progress as fact. Thereon the learning of the man conceived Once more night’s pale illuminations, goldBeneath, far underneath, the surface of His eye and audible in the mountain of His ear, the very material of his mind."

"The words they spoke were voices that she heard. She looked at them and saw them as they were And what she felt fought off the barest phrase."

"They married well because the marriage-place Was what they loved. It was neither heaven nor hell. They were love’s characters come face to face."

"Each must the other take as sign, short sign To stop the whirlwind, balk the elements."

"This was their ceremonial hymn: Anon We loved but would no marriage make. Anon The one refused the other one to take, Foreswore the sipping of the marriage wine."

"We reason of these things with later reason And we make of what we see, what we see clearly And have seen, a place dependent on ourselves."

"A dead shepherd brought tremendous chords from hellAnd bad the sheep carouse. Or so they said. Children in love with them brought early flowers And scattered them about, no two alike."

"Red-in-red repetitions never going Away,a little rusty, a little rouged, A little roughened and ruder, a crownThe eye could not escape, a red renown Blowing itself upon the tedious ear."

"It was enough for her that she remembered."

"The blue woman, linked and lacquered, at her window Did not desire that feathery argentines Should be cold silver, neither that frothy clouds Should foam, be foamy waves, should move like them"

"The difficultest rigor is forthwith, On the image of what we see, to catch from that Irrational moment its unreasoning, As when the sun comes rising, when the sea Clears deeply, when the moon hangs on the wall Of heaven-haven. These are not things transformed. Yet we are shaken by them as if they were. We reason about them with a later reason."

"To speak of joy and to sing of it, borne on The shoulders of joyous men, to feel the heart That is the common, the bravest fundament, This is a facile exercise"

"Of these beginnings, gay and green, propose The suitable amours. Time will write them down."

"The casual is not Enough. The freshness of transformation isThe freshness of a world. It is our own, It is ourselves, the freshness of ourselves, And that necessity and that presentationAre rubbings of a glass in which we peer."

"Like a page of music, like an upper air, Like a momentary color, in which swans Were seraphs, were saints, were changing essences. The west wind was the music, the motion, the force To which the swans curveted, a will to change, A will to make iris frettings on the blank."

"He tries by a peculiar speech to speak The peculiar potency of the general"

"Is there a poem that never reaches words And one that chaffers the time away? Is the poem both peculiar and general? There’s a meditation there, in which there seemsTo be an evasion, a thing not apprehended or Not apprehended well. Does the poet Evade us, as in a senseless element?"

"The poem goes form the poet’s gibberish to The gibberish of the vulgate and back again."

"A fictive covering Weaves always glistening from the heart and mind."

"Clothe me entire in the final filament, So that I tremble with such love so known And myself am precious for your perfecting."

"I am the spouse. She took her necklace off And laid it in the sand. As I am, I am The spouse. She opened her stone-studded belt. I am the spouse, divested of bright gold, The spouse beyond emerald or amethyst, Beyond the burning body that I bear. I am the woman stripped more nakedly Than nakedness, standing before an inflexible Order, saying I am the contemplated spouse."

"The fluctuations of certainty, the change Of degrees of perception in the scholar’s dark."

"Tonight the lilacs magnify The easy passion, the ever-ready love Of the lover that lies within us and we breatheAn odor evoking nothing, absolute. We encounter in the dead middle of the night The purple odor, the abundant bloom."

"Eye without lid, mind without any dream —These are of minstrels lacking minstrelsy, Of an earth in which the first leaf is the tale Of leaves, in which the sparrow is a birdOf stone, that never changes. Bethou him, you And you, bethou him and bethou. It is A sound like any other. It will end."

"There was such idiot minstrelsy in rain, So many clappers going without bells, That these bethous compose a heavenly gong. One voice repeating, one tireless chorister, The phrases of a single phrase, ke-ke, A single text, granite monotony"

"Bethou me, said sparrow, to the crackled blade, And you, and you, bethou me as you blow, When in my coppice you behold me be."

"An unaffected man in a negative light Could not have borne his labor nor have died Sighing that he should leave the banjo’s twang."