Life is the thing – the song of life – The eager plow, the thirsty knife!
All that is beautiful, and all that looks on beauty with eyes filled with fire, like a lover’s eyes: all of this is yours; you gave it to me, sunlight! all these stars are yours; you gave them to me, skies!
The wind shrieks, the wind grieves; It dashes the leaves on walls, it whirls then again; And the enormous sleeper vaguely and stupidly dreams And desires to stir, to resist a ghost of pain.
The days, the nights, flow one by one above us. The hours go silently over our lifted faces. We are like dreamers who walk beneath a sea. Beneath high walls we flow in the sun together. We sleep, we wake, we laugh, we pursue, we flee.
The wandering one, the inquisitive dreamer of dreams, the eternal asker of answers, stands in the street, and lifts his palms for the first cold ghost of rain.
No god save self, that is the way to live...
Death is one dream out of another flowing.
It’s time to make love, douse the glim; The fireflies twinkle and dim; The stars lean together Like birds of a feather, And the loin lies down with the limb.
Death is never an ending, death is a change; Death is beautiful, for death is strange; Death is one dream out of another flowing.
Separate we come, and separate we go, And this be it known, is all that we know.
I love you, what star do you live on?
The one you love leans forward, smiles, deceives you, Opens a door through which you see dark dreams.
Death is a meeting place of sea and sea.
We were all born of flesh, in a flare of pain. We do not remember the red roots whence we rose, but we know that we rose and walked, that after a while we shall lie down again.
He whose first emotion, on the view of an excellent work, is to undervalue or depreciate it, will never have one of his own to show.
For in this walk, this voyage, it is yourself, the profound history of your ‘self,’ that now as always you encounter.
Poetry will absorb and transmute, as it always has done, and glorify, all that we can know.
Music I heard with you was more than music, and bread I broke with you was more than bread. Now that I am without you, all is desolate; all that was once so beautiful is dead.
One is least sure of one’s self, sometimes, when one is most positive.
Before him, numberless lovers smiled and talked. And death was observed with sudden cries, And birth with laughter and pain. And the trees grew taller and blacker against the skies And night came down again.
Is it a comb, a fan, a torn dress, a curtain, a bed, an empty rice-bin? It hardly seems to matter. The Chinese poet makes a heart-breaking poetry out of these quite as naturally as Keats did out of the song of a nightingale heard in a spring garden. It is rarely dithyrambic, rarely high-pitched: part of its charm is its tranquility, its self-control. And the humblest reads it with as much emotion as the most learned.