Why did my parents send me to the schools That I with knowledge might enrich my mind? Since the desire to know first made men fools, And did corrupt the root of all mankind.
From plane of light to plane, wings dipping through Geometries and orchids that the sunset builds, Out of the peak's black angularity of shadow, riding The last tumultuous avalanche of Light above pines and the guttural gorge, The hawk comes.
When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city, Mad-eyed from stating the obvious, Not proclaiming our fall but begging us In God’s name to have self-pity,
Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range, The long numbers that rocket the mind; Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind, Unable to fear what is too strange.
[Supposed of Pamphylax the Antiochene: It is a parchment, of my rolls the fifth, Hath three skins glued together, is all Greek, And goeth from Epsilon down to Mu: Lies second in the surnamed Chosen Chest, Stained and conserved with juice of terebinth, Covered with cloth of hair, and lettered Xi, From Xanthus, my wife's uncle, now at peace: Mu and Epsilon stand for my own name. I may not write it, but I make a cross To show I wait His coming, with the rest, And leave off here: beginneth Pamphylax.]
I said, "If one should wet his lips with wine, "And slip the broadest plantain-leaf we find,
It is true also that we here are Americans: That we use the machines: that a sight of the god is unusual: That more people have more thoughts: that there are
Progress and science and tractors and revolutions and Marx and the wars more antiseptic and murderous And music in every home: there is also Hoover.
Does the lady suggest we should write it out in The Word?
Farewell, too little and too lately known, Whom I began to think and call my own; For sure our souls were near ally'd; and thine Cast in the same poetic mould with mine. One common note on either lyre did strike, And knaves and fools we both abhorr'd alike: To the same goal did both our studies drive, The last set out the soonest did arrive.
Dans l'adversité de nos meilleurs amis nous trouvons quelque chose, qui ne nous déplaît pas. ["In the hard times of our best friends we find something that doesn't displease us."] As Rochefoucauld his maxims drew From Nature, I believe 'em true: They argue no corrupted mind In him; the fault is in mankind.
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