My angel, don't think the great stillness is wooing us: We just haven't slept the same among the letters that have a habit of Recognizing us. Those beautiful letters live in Paris all year around. For even the best of men go astray with words within the gentle depths
When they are to express something unutterable. But I believe nevertheless that you need not be left without them as a Part of me, as a recreation between hesitations, The boundless ones in moments of doubts.
Thousands lavishing, thousands starving; intrigues, war, flatteries, envyings, hypocrisies, lying vanities, hollow amusements, exhaustion, dissipation, death—and giddiness and laughter, from the first scene to the last. —Samuel Palmer, 1858
Only joy, now here you are, Fit to hear and ease my care; Let my whispering voice obtain, Sweet reward for sharpest pain; Take me to thee, and thee to me. No, no, no, no, my dear, let be.
Over the honored bones of Boston (resting, as we say) old leaves’ bones underfoot are restless; and boys and schoolgirls going home splash through them, reciting alphabet lately received. They run the known, intone the unsure patterns, repeat the magic, nearly Grecian syllables;
I should like to live in a sunny town like this Where every afternoon is half-day closing And I would wait at the terminal for the one train Of the day, pacing the platform, and no one arriving.
At the far end of the platform is a tunnel, and the train Slows out of it like a tear from a single eye. You couldn’t get further than this, the doors all opened And the porter with rolled sleeves wielding a mop.
Somehow your letter was no surprise (and I think you knew that it was no surprise or you would have tried to break the news more gently); somehow I think we understand what the other is going to say long before we say it—a proof of love and, I think, a protection against misunderstanding. So I've been expecting this letter for five weeks now—and I still don't know how to answer it.
Bohemia is a dreadful, wonderful place. It is full of hideous people and beautiful poetry. It is a hell full of windows into heaven. It would be wrong of me to drag a person I love into such a place against his will. Unless you walk into it freely, and with open despairing eyes, you can't even see the windows. And yet I can't leave Bohemia myself to come to you—Bohemia is inside of me, in a sense is me, was the price I paid, the oath I signed to write poetry.
I think that someday you'll enter Bohemia—not for me (I'm not worth the price, no human being is), but for poetry—to see the windows and maybe blast a few yourself through the rocks of hell. I'll be there waiting for you, my arms open to receive you.
But let's have these letters go on, whether it be days, years, or never before I see you. We can still love each other although we cannot see each other. We will be no farther apart when I'm in Berkeley than we were when I was in Minneapolis. And we can continue to love each other, by letter, from alien worlds.
My letters! all dead paper, ... mute and white ! — And yet they seem alive and quivering Against my tremulous hands which loose the string And let them drop down on my knee to-night. This said, ... he wished to have me in his sight Once, as a friend: this fixed a day in spring To come and touch my hand ... a simple thing, Yet I wept for it! — this, ... the paper's light ...
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