"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."

"Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates. It is of the nature of that in which it is found, whether the poem, the manner of a god, the bearing of a man. It is not a dress."

"A breath upon her hand Muted the night. She turned — A cymbal crashed, Amid roaring horns."

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

"The truth seems to be that we live in concepts of the imagination before the reason has established them. If this is true, then reason is simply the methodizer of the imagination."

"The day of the sun is like the day of a king. It is a promenade in the morning, a sitting on the throne at noon, a pageant in the evening."

"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."

"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."

"A diary is more or less the work of a man of clay whose hands are clumsy and in whose eyes there is no light."

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

"One ought not to hoard culture. It should be adapted and infused into society as a leaven. Liberality of culture does not mean illiberality of its benefits."

"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."

"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."

"Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!"

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

"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."

"In European thought in general, as contrasted with American, vigor, life and originality have a kind of easy, professional utterance. American — on the other hand, is expressed in an eager amateurish way. A European gives a sense of scope, of survey, of consideration. An American is strained, sensational. One is artistic gold; the other is bullion."

"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."

"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?"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"To be young is all there is in the world. The rest is nonsense — and cant. They talk so beautifully about work and having a family and a home (and I do, too, sometimes) — but it’s all worry and head-aches and respectable poverty and forced gushing.... Telling people how nice it is, when, in reality, you would give all of your last thirty years for one of your first thirty. Old people are tremendous frauds."

"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."

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

"The world about us would be desolate except for the world within us."

"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."

"How full of trifles everything is! It is only one’s thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture."

"Beauty is momentary in the mind — The fitful tracing of a portal; But in the flesh it is immortal. The body dies; the body's beauty lives. So evenings die, in their green going, A wave, interminably flowing. So gardens die, their meek breath scenting The cowl of winter, done repenting. So maidens die, to the auroral Celebration of a maiden's choral."

"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?"

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

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

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

"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."

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

"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."