Society and the World

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

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

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.

We are the mimics. Clouds are pedagogues.

The President ordains the bee to be Immortal.

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.

The people know the salt of the sea and the strength of the winds lashing the corners of the earth. The people take the earth as a tomb of rest and a cradle of hope. Who else speaks for the Family of Man?

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.

Lay me on an anvil, O God. Beat me and hammer me into a crowbar. Let me pry loose old walls. Let me lift and loosen old foundations.

The learning and blundering people will live on. They will be tricked and sold and again sold And go back to the nourishing earth for rootholds.

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo. Shovel them under and let me work— I am the grass; I cover all.

Hog butcher for the world, Tool maker, stacker of wheat, Player with railroads and the nation’s freight handler; Stormy, husky, brawling, City of the big shoulders.

I am the people—the mob—the crowd—the mass. Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me?

It takes all sorts of in and outdoor schooling To get adapted to my kind of fooling.