"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."

"Poetry is the subject of the poem, From this the poem issues and To this returns. Between the two, Between issue and return, there is An absence in reality, Things as they are. Or so we say. But are these separate?"

"A substitute for all the gods: This self, not that gold self aloft, Alone, one's shadow magnified, Lord of the body, looking down, As now and called most high, The shadow of Chocorua In an immenser heaven, aloft, Alone, lord of the land and lord Of the men that live in the land, high lord. One's self and the mountains of one's land, Without shadows, without magnificence, The flesh, the bone, the dirt, the stone."

"What is there in life except one's ideas. Good air, good friend, what is there in life? Is it ideas that I believe?"

"That I may reduce the monster to Myself, and then may be myself In face of the monster, be more than part Of it, more than the monstrous player of One of its monstrous lutes, not be Alone, but reduce the monster and be, Two things, the two together as one, And play of the monster and of myself, Or better not of myself at all, But of that as its intelligence, Being the lion in the lute Before the lion locked in stone."

"Place honey on the altars and die, You lovers that are bitter at heart."

"Things as they are have been destroyed. Have I? Am I a man that is dead At a table on which the food is cold? Is my thought a memory, not alive? Is the spot on the floor, there, wine or blood And whichever it may be, is it mine?"

"A candle is enough to light the world. It makes it clear. Even at noon It glistens in essential dark. At night, it lights the fruit and wine, The book and bread, things as they are..."

"First one beam, then another, then A thousand are radiant in the sky. Each is both star and orb; and day Is the riches of their atmosphere."

"Be content — Expansions, diffusions — content to be The unspotted imbecile revery, The heraldic center of the world Of blue, blue sleek with a hundred chins, The amorist Adjective aflame..."

"I know that timid breathing. Where Do I begin and end? And where, As I strum the thing, do I pick up That which momentously declares Itself not to be I and yet Must be. It could be nothing else."

"The blue guitar And I are one."

"The sea returns upon the men, The fields entrap the children, brick Is a weed and all the flies are caught, Wingless and withered, but living alive. The discord merely magnified. Deeper within the belly's dark Of time, time grows upon the rock."

"Slowly the ivy on the stones Becomes the stones. Women become The cities, children become the fields And men in waves become the sea."

"Behold The approach of him whom none believes, Whom all believe that all believe, A pagan in a varnished car."

"And the color, the overcast blue Of the air, in which the blue guitar Is a form, described but difficult, And I am merely a shadow hunched Above the arrowy, still string, The maker of a thing yet to be made; The color like a thought that grows Out of a mood, the tragic robe Of the actor, half his gesture, half His speech, the dress of his meaning, silk Sodden with his melancholy words, The weather of his stage, himself."

"Struggling toward impassioned choirs, Crying among the clouds, enraged By gold antagonists in air — I know my lazy, leaden twang Is like the reason in a storm; And yet it brings the storm to bear. I twang it out and leave it there."

"It is the sun that shares our works. The moon shares nothing. It is a sea. When shall I come to say of the sun, It is a sea; it shares nothing; The sun no longer shares our works And the earth is alive with creeping men, Mechanical beetles never quite warm? And shall I then stand in the sun, as now I stand in the moon, and call it good, The immaculate, the merciful good, Detached from us, from things as they are? Not to be part of the sun? To stand Remote and call it merciful? The strings are cold on the blue guitar."

"The thinking of art seems final when The thinking of god is smoky dew."

"Do not speak to us of the greatness of poetry, Of the torches wisping in the underground, Of the structure of vaults upon a point of light. There are no shadows in our sun, Day is desire and night is sleep. There are no shadows anywhere. The earth, for us, is flat and bare. There are no shadows."

"So that's life, then: things are they are? It picks its way on the blue guitar. A million people on one string? And all their manner in the thing, And all their manner, right and wrong, And all their manner, weak and strong? And that's life, then: things as they are, This buzzing of the blue guitar."

"If to serenade almost to man Is to miss, by that, things as they are, Say that it is the serenade Of a man that plays a blue guitar."

"The man bent over his guitar, A shearsman of sorts. The day was green. They said, "You have a blue guitar, You do not play things as they are." The man replied, "Things as they are Are changed upon the blue guitar." And they said then, "But play, you must, A tune beyond us, yet ourselves, A tune upon the blue guitar Of things exactly as they are.""

"The sun, that brave man, Comes through boughs that lie in wait, That brave man.Green and gloomy eyes In dark forms of the grass Run away.The good stars, Pale helms and spiky spurs, Run away.Fears of my bed, Fears of life and fears of death, Run away.That brave man comes up From below and walks without meditation, That brave man."

"She sang beyond the genius of the sea"

"These Are the music of meet resignation; these The responsive, still sustaining pomps for you To magnify, if in that drifting waste You are to be accompanied by more Than mute bare splendors of the sun and moon."

"Gloomy grammarians in golden gowns, Meekly you keep the mortal rendezvous, Eliciting the still sustaining pomps Of speech which are like music so profound They seem an exaltation without sound."

"Donna, donna, dark, Stooping in indigo gown And cloudy constellations, Conceal yourself or disclose Fewest things to the lover — A hand that bears a thick-leaved fruit, A pungent bloom against your shade."

"A few things for themselves, Florida, venereal soil, Disclose to the lover."

"It was evening all afternoon. It was snowing And it was going to snow. The blackbird sat In the cedar-limbs."

"I know noble accents And lucid, inescapable rhythms; But I know, too, That the blackbird is involved In what I know."

"O thin men of Haddam, Why do you imagine golden birds? Do you not see how the blackbird Walks around the feet Of the women about you?"

"I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling Or just after."

"A man and a woman Are one. A man and a woman and a blackbird Are one."

"Among twenty snowy mountains, The only moving thing Was the eye of the blackbird."

"That tuft of jungle feathers, That animal eye, Is just what you say.That savage of fire, That seed, Have it your way.The world is ugly, And the people are sad."

"That strange flower, the sun, Is just what you say. Have it your way.The world is ugly, And the people are sad.."

"What is divinity if it can come Only in silent shadows and in dreams?"

"We live in an old chaos of the sun, Or an old dependency of day and night, Or island solitude, unsponsored, free, Of that wide water, inescapable. Deer walk upon our mountains, and quail Whistle about us their spontaneous cries; Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness; And, in the isolation of the sky, At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make Ambiguous undulations as they sink, Downward to darkness, on extended wings."

"Death is the mother of beauty"

"Take from the dresser of deal, Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet On which she embroidered fantails once And spread it so as to cover her face. If her horny feet protrude, they come To show how cold she is, and dumb. Let the lamp affix its beam. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream."

"Let the wenches dawdle in such dress As they are used to wear, and let the boys Bring flowers in last month's newspapers. Let be be finale of seem. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream."

"One must have a mind of winter To regard the frost and the boughs Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;And have been cold a long time To behold the junipers shagged with ice, The spruces rough in the distant glitterOf the January sun; and not to think Of any misery in the sound of the wind, In the sound of a few leaves,Which is the sound of the land Full of the same wind That is blowing in the same bare placeFor the listener, who listens in the snow, And, nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is."

"The boots of the men clump On the boards of the bridge. The first white wall of the village Rises through fruit-trees. Of what was it I was thinking? So the meaning escapes."

"Twenty men crossing a bridge, Into a village, Are Twenty men crossing a bridge Into a village."

"This is old song That will not declare itself..."