Society and the World

Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin They think of firelit homes, clean beds, and wives.

No picture is made to endure nor to live with but it is made to sell and sell quickly with usura, sin against nature, is thy bread ever more of stale rags is thy bread dry as paper.

No picture is made to endure nor to live with but it is made to sell and sell quickly with usura, sin against nature, is thy bread ever more of stale rags is thy bread dry as paper.

With Usura With usura hath no man a house of good stone each block cut smooth and well fitting.

With Usura With usura hath no man a house of good stone each block cut smooth and well fitting.

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.

Some quick to arm, some for adventure, some from fear of weakness, some from fear of censure, some for love of slaughter, in imagination, learning later… some in fear, learning love of slaughter; Died some, pro patria, walked eye-deep in hell believing in old men’s lies, the unbelieving came home, home to a lie.

The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough.

All men by their nature give praise.

Say it, no ideas but in things.

The crowd at the ball game is moved uniformly by a spirit of uselessness which delights them—

I walk back streets admiring the houses of the very poor.

I have discovered that most of the beauties of travel are due to the strange hours we keep to see them.

Shepherdess, O Eiffel Tower, your flock of bridges is bleating this morning. 1

We keep coming back and coming back To the real: to the hotel instead of the hymns That fall upon it out of the wind.

They will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne.

The man-hero is not the exceptional monster, But he that of repetition is most master.

That in each other are included, the whole, The complicate, the amassing harmony.

The President ordains the bee to be Immortal.

We are the mimics. Clouds are pedagogues.

A. A violent order is disorder; and B. A great disorder is an order. These Two things are one.

We live in an old chaos of the sun, Or old dependency of day and night, Or island solitude, unsponsored, free, Of that wide water, inescapable. Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail Whistle about us their spontaneous cries; Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness; And, in the isolation of the sky, At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make Ambiguous undulations as they sink, Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair.

Twenty men crossing a bridge, Into a village, Are twenty men crossing twenty bridges, Into twenty villages, Or one man Crossing a single bridge into a village.