Men may scoff, and men may pray, But they pay Every pleasure with a pain.
Life – give me life until the end, That at the very top of being, The battle-spirit shouting in my blood, Out of the reddest hell of the fight I may be snatched and flung Into the everlasting lull, The immortal, incommunicable dream.
Night with her train of stars And her great gift of sleep.
A late lark twitters from the quiet skies.
Into the winter’s gray delight, Into the summer’s golden dream, Holy and high and impartial, Death, the mother of Life, Mingles all men for ever.
And lo, the Hospital, gray, quiet, old, Where life and death like friendly chafferers meet.
Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed.
So be my passing! My task accomplished and the long day done, My wages taken, and in my heart Some late lark singing, Let me be gathered in the quiet west, The sundown splendid and serene, Death.
Open your heart and take us in, Love-love and me.
I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul.
Life – life – let there be life!
Life – life – let there be life! Better a thousand times the roaring hours When wave and wind, Like the Arch-Murderer in flight From the Avenger at his heel, Storm through the desolate fastnesses And wild waste places of the world!
Madam Life’s a piece in bloom Death goes dogging everywhere: she’s the tenant of the room, he’s the ruffian on the stair.
Pointed criticism, if accurate, often gives the artist an inner sense of relief. The criticism that damages is that which disparages, dismisses, ridicules, or condemns.
Life is a smoke that curls- Curls in a flickering skein, That winds and whisks and whirls, A figment thin and vain, Into the vast inane. One end for hut and hall.
For it’s home, dearie, home – it’s home I want to be. Our topsails are hoisted, and we’ll away to sea. O, the oak and the ash and the bonnie birken tree They’re all growing green in the old countrie.
So many are the deaths we die Before we can be dead indeed.
Shakespeare and Rembrandt have in common the faculty of quickening speculation and compelling the minds of men to combat and discussion.
This is the merit and distinction of art: to be more real than reality, to be not nature but nature’s essence.
Essayists, like poets, are born and not made, and for one worth remembering, the world is confronted with a hundred not worth reading. Your true essayist is, in a literary sense, the friend of everybody.
Now, to read poetry at all is to have an ideal anthology of one’s own, and in that possession to be incapable of content with the anthologies of all the world besides.