I Happy are men who yet before they are killed Can let their veins run cold. Whom no compassion fleers Or makes their feet Sore on the alleys cobbled with their brothers. The front line withers. But they are troops who fade, not flowers, For poets’ tearful fooling: Men, gaps for filling: Losses, who might have fought Longer; but no one bothers.
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 where I sit, I can see other things: a silver porcupine, pins standing upright. It is a vanished tale of a vanished forest at the shore of a vanished ocean.
I call the dead as often as I can. In the vaults, among mummies—this is pure memorial. I am the girl in whose eyes the name is written.
Doctor, you say there are no haloes around the streetlights in Paris and what I see is an aberration caused by old age, an affliction. I tell you it has taken me all my life to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels, to soften and blur and finally banish the edges you regret I don’t see,
Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme— why are they no help to me now I want to make something imagined, not recalled? I hear the noise of my own voice: The painter’s vision is not a lens, it trembles to caress the light. But sometimes everything I write
Nature, which is the vast creation’s soul, That steady curious agent in the whole, The art of Heaven, the order of this frame, Is only number in another name. For as some king conqu’ring what was his own, Hath choice of several titles to his crown; So harmony on this score now, that then, Yet still is all that takes and governs men. Beauty is but composure, and we find Content is but the concord of the mind, Friendship the unison of well-turned hearts, Honor the chorus of the noblest parts, And all the world on which we can reflect Music to th’ear, or to the intellect. If then each man a little world must be,
On the long shore, lit by the moon To show them properly alone, Two lovers suddenly embraced So that their shadows were as one. The ordinary night was graced For them by the swift tide of blood That silently they took at flood, And for a little time they prized
Confess: it’s my profession that alarms you. This is why few people ask me to dinner, though Lord knows I don’t go out of my way to be scary. I wear dresses of sensible cut and unalarming shades of beige, I smell of lavender and go to the hairdresser’s: no prophetess mane of mine,
‘Whether, as the intensity of seeing increases, one’s distance from Them, the people, does not also increase’ I know, of course I know, I can enter no other place
Yet I am one of those who from nothing but man’s way of thought and one of his dialects and what has happened to me Have made poetry
To dream of that beach For the sake of an instant in the eyes,
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