"The partaker partakes of that which changes him. The child that touches takes character from the thing, The body, it touches. The captain and his menAre one and the sailor and the sea are one."

"In solitude the trumpets of solitude Are not of another solitude resounding; A little string speaks for a crowd of voices."

"Music falls on the silence like a sense, A passion that we feel, not understand."

"Two things of opposite natures seem to depend On one another, as a man depends On a woman, day on night, the imaginedOn the real. This is the origin of change. Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace And forth the particulars of rapture come."

"Nothing had happened because nothing had changed. Yet the General was rubbish in the end."

"The right, uplifted foreleg of the horse Suggested that, at the final funeral, The music halted and the horse stood still."

"Should there be a question of returning or Of death in memory’s dream? Is spring a sleep?This warmth is for lovers at last accomplishing Their love, this beginning, not resuming, this Booming and booming of the new-come bee."

"The President has apples on the table And barefoot servants round him, who adjust The curtains to a metaphysical "t""

"The President ordains the bee to be Immortal. The President ordains."

"The bees came booming as if they had never gone, As if hyacinths had never gone. We say This changes and that changes. Thus the constant Violets, doves, girls, bees and hyacinths Are inconstant objects of inconstant cause In a universe of inconstancy. This meansNight-blue is an inconstant thing. The seraph Is satyr in Saturn, according to his thoughts."

"The old seraph, parcel-gilded, among violets Inhaled the appointed odor, while the doves Rose up like phantoms from chronologies."

"It is of him, ephebe, to make, to confect The final elegance, not to console Nor sanctify, but plainly to propound."

"What chieftain, walking by himself, crying Most miserable, most victorious,Does not see these separate figures one by one, And yet see only one, in his old coat, His slouching pantaloons, beyond the town,Looking for what was, where it used to be?"

"In being more than an exception, part,Though an heroic part, of the commonal. The major abstraction is the commonal, The inanimate, difficult visage."

"The major abstraction is the idea of man And major man is its exponent, abler In the abstract than in his singular, More fecund as principle than particle"

"He is and may be but oh! He is, he is, This foundling of the infected past, so bright, So moving in the manner of his hand. Yet look not at his colored eyes. Give him No names. Dismiss him from your images. The hot of him is purest in the heart."

"My dame, sing for this person accurate songs."

"Apotheosis is not The origin of the major man. He comes,p>Compact in invincible foils, from reason, Lighted at midnight by the studious eye, Swaddled in revery, the object ofThe hum of thoughts evaded in the mind..."

"The romantic intoning, the declaimed clairvoyance Are parts of apotheosis, appropriate And of its nature, the idiom thereof."

"He might take habit, whether from wave or phrase,Or power of the wave, or deepened speech, Or a leaner being, moving in on him, Of greater aptitude and apprehension,As if the waves at last were never broken, As if the language suddenly, with ease, Said things it had laboriously spoken."

"Logos and logic, crystal hypothesis, Incipit and a form to speak the word And every latent double in the word, Beau linguist."

"The first idea is an imagined thing."

"As a man and woman meet and love forthwith. Perhaps there are moments of awakening, Extreme, fortuitous, personal, in whichWe more than awaken, sit on the edge of sleep, As on an elevation, and behold The academies like structures in a mist."

"Perhaps The truth depends on a walk around a lake,A composing as the body tires, a stop To see hepatica, a stop to watch A definition growing certain andA wait within that certainty, a rest In the swags of pine-trees bordering the lake. Perhaps there are times of inherent excellence"

"It must be visible or invisible, Invisible or visible or both: A seeing and unseeing in the eye.The weather and the giant of the weather, Say the weather, the mere weather, the mere air: An abstraction blooded, as a man by thought."

"My house has changed a little in the sun. The fragrance of the magnolias come close, False flick, false form, but falseness close to kin."

"Without a name and nothing to be desired, If only imagined but imagined well."

"Not to be realized because not to Be seen, not to be loved nor hated because Not to be realized."

"Yet voluble of dumb violence. You look Across the roofs as sigil and as ward And in your centre mark them and are cowed . . ."

"Abysmal instruments make sounds like pips Of the sweeping meanings that we add to them."

"We are the mimics. Clouds are pedagogues."

"The clouds preceded us.There was a muddy centre before we breathed. There was a myth before the myth began, Venerable and articulate and complete.From this the poem springs: that we live in a place That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves And hard it is in spite of blazoned days."

"The first idea was not our own. Adam In Eden was the father of Descartes And eve made air the mirror of herself,Of her sons and of her daughters."

"Life’s nonsense pierces us with strange relation."

"The poem, through candor, brings back a power again That gives a candid kind to everything."

"The poem refreshes life so that we share, For a moment, the first idea . . . It satisfies Belief in an immaculate beginningAnd sends us, winged by an unconscious will, To an immaculate end."

"The monastic man is an artist.The philosopher Appoints man’s place in music, say, today. But the priest desires. The philosopher desires.And not to have is the beginning of desire. To have what is not is its ancient cycle."

"So poisonousAre the ravishments of truth, so fatal to The truth itself, the first idea becomes The hermit in a poet’s metaphors,Who comes and goes and comes and goes all day."

"Phoebus is dead, ephebe. But Phoebus was A name for something that never could be named. There was a project for the sun and is.There is a project for the sun. The sun Must bear no name, gold flourisher, but be In the difficulty of what it is to be."

"The death of one god is the death of all."

"Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea Of this invention, this invented world, The inconceivable idea of the sun.You must become an ignorant man again And see the sun again with an ignorant eye And see it clearly in the idea of it.Never suppose an inventing mind as source Of this idea nor for that mind compose A voluminous master folded in his fire."

"Here is the bread of time to come, Here is its actual stone. The bread Will be our bread, the stone will be Our bed and we shall sleep by night. We shall forget by day, except The moments when we choose to play The imagined pine, the imagined jay."

"Throw away the lights, the definitions, And say of what you see in the dark That it is this or that it is that, But do not use the rotted names. How should you walk in that space and know Nothing of the madness of space, Nothing of its jocular procreations? Throw the lights away. Nothing must stand Between you and the shapes you take When the crust of shape has been destroyed."

"What is beyond the cathedral, outside, Balances with nuptial song. So it is to sit and to balance things To and to and to the point of still, To say of one mask it is like, To say of another it is like, To know that the balance does not quite rest, That the mask is strange, however like."

"The wind in which the dead leaves blow. Here I inhale profounder strength And as I am, I speak and move And things are as I think they are And say they are on the blue guitar."

"I am a native in this world And think in it as a native thinks"

"It is the sea that whitens the roof. The sea drifts through the winter air. It is the sea that the north wind makes. The sea is in the falling snow. This gloom is the darkness of the sea."

"The swarm of thoughts, the swarm of dreams Of inaccessible Utopia. A mountainous music always seemed To be falling and to be passing away."

"I play. But this is what I think."