This poem has been called obscure. I refuse to believe that it is obscurer than pity, violence, or suffering. But being a poem, not a lifetime, it is more compressed.
The crisp path through the field in this December snow, in the deep dark, where we trod the buried grass like ghosts on dry toast.
The only surprising thing about miracles, however small, is that they sometimes happen.
I am going into the darkness of the darkness for ever.
There are always Uncles at Christmas.
Raging against the dying of the light – used in The Book of Peach.
Lie down, lie easy. Let me shipwreck in your thighs.
Life is a terrible thing, thank God.
Reaching a self freedom is the only object.
Into the sea of yourself like a young dog, and bring out a pearl.
Speak, then, o body, shout aloud, And break my only mind from chains To go where ploughing’s ended.
And the whole pain flows open and I die.
Mr. Kipling stands for everything in this cankered world which I would wish were otherwise.
To surrender now is to pay the expensive ogre twice. Ancient woods of my blood, dash down to the nut of the seas if I take to burn or return this world which is each man’s work.
This is the world: the lying likeness of Our strips of stuff that tatter as we move Loving and being loth; The dream that kicks the buried from their sack And lets their trash be honoured as the quick. This is the world. Have faith.
The ball I threw while playing in the park has not yet reached the ground.
Time kills me terribly. ‘Time shall not murder you,’ He said, ‘Nor the green nought be hurt; Who could hack out your unsucked heart, O green and unborn and undead?’ I saw time murder me.
Or a nacreous sleep among soft particles and charms.
Our snow was not only shaken from whitewash buckets down the sky, it came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees; snow grew overnight on the roofs of houses like a pure and grandfather moss, minutely white-ivied the walls and settled on the postman, opening the gate, like a dumb, numb thunderstorm of white, torn Christmas cards.
And the high-heaped fire spat, all ready for the chestnuts and the mulling pokers.
She has forgotten dying.