Life and Existence

Magnificently unprepared For the long littleness of life.

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.

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 Wrong from the start— No, hardly, but seeing he had been born In a half savage country, out of date.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.

I hibernated in my past. 5

I hibernated in my past. 5

Under Pont Mirabeau flows the Seine. 3

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

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

We say God and the imagination are one… How high that highest candle lights the dark. 1

Total grandeur of a total edifice, Chosen by an inquisitor of structures For himself. He stops upon this threshold As if the design of all his words takes form And frame from thinking and is realized.

And one trembles to be so understood and, at last, To understand, as if to know became The fatality of seeing things too well.

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.

These external regions, what do we fill them with Except reflections, the escapades of death, Cinderella fulfilling herself beneath the roof.

The death of one god is the death of all.

The inconceivable idea of the sun. You must become an ignorant man again And see the sun again with an ignorant eye And see it clearly in the idea of it.