Life and Existence

Lend me the stone strength of the past and I will lend you The wings of the future, for I have them.

Lend me the stone strength of the past and I will lend you The wings of the future, for I have them.

Blow out, you bugles, over the rich dead! There’s none of these so lonely and poor of old, But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold.

Now, God be thanked, Who has matched us with His hour, And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping.

Now, God be thanked, Who has matched us with His hour, And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping.

Then, the cool kindliness of sheets, that soon Smooth away trouble; and the rough male kiss Of blankets; grainy wood; live hair that is Shining and free; blue-massing clouds; the keen Unpassioned beauty of a great machine; The benison of hot water; furs to touch; The good smell of old clothes.

Fish say, they have their stream and pond; But is there anything beyond?

And when the war is done and youth stone dead I’d toddle safely home and die—in bed.

Soldiers are citizens of death’s gray land.

Crises of expression and spasms of eros: that’s the man of today, the inside a vacuum, the continuity of personality provided by his suit, which with stout cloth might be good for ten years.

Crises of expression and spasms of eros: that’s the man of today, the inside a vacuum, the continuity of personality provided by his suit, which with stout cloth might be good for ten years.

Magnificently unprepared For the long littleness of life.

What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage Whose world, or mine or theirs or is it of none? First came the seen, then thus the palpable What thou lovest well is thy true heritage.

There died a myriad, And of the best, among them, For an old bitch gone in the teeth, For a botched civilization. Charm, smiling at the good mouth, Quick eyes gone under earth’s lid, For two gross of broken statues, For a few thousand battered books.

For three years, out of key with his time, He strove to resuscitate the dead art Of poetry; to maintain “the sublime” In the old sense. Wrong from the start— No, hardly, but seeing he had been born In a half savage country, out of date.

The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind. The paired butterflies are already yellow with August Over the grass in the West garden; They hurt me. I grow older.

It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.

They enter the new world naked, cold, uncertain of all save that they enter.

Old age is a flight of small cheeping birds skimming bare trees above a snow glaze.

No wreaths please— especially no hothouse flowers. Some common memento is better, something he prized and is known by: his old clothes—a few books perhaps.

As a white candle In a holy place, So is the beauty Of an aged face.

Come night, strike hour. Days go, I endure. 4

Come night, strike hour. Days go, I endure. 4

I hibernated in my past. 5