"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"

"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"

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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?"

"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."

"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."

"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"

"On a blue island in a sky-wide water The wild orange trees continued to bloom and to bear, Long after the planter’s death."

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

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

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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"

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

"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?"

"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."

"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."

"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..."

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

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

"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."

"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."

"The first idea is an imagined thing."

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

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

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

"We are the mimics. Clouds are pedagogues."

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

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

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

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