Consciousness and Self-Knowledge

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Thus the theory of description matters most. It is the theory of the word for those For whom the word is the making of the world, The buzzing world and lisping firmament. It is a world of words to the end of it, In which nothing solid is its solid self.

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

I am a native in this world And think in it as a native thinks.

That looks in on to a mood apart.

We dance round in a ring and suppose, But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.

That day she put our heads together, Fate had her imagination about her, Your head so much concerned with outer, Mine with inner, weather.

They would not find me changed from him they knew— Only more sure of all I thought was true.

I must lie down where all the ladders start, In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.

My temptation is quiet. Here at life’s end Neither loose imagination, Nor the mill of the mind Consuming its rag and bone, Can make the truth known.

The intellect of man is forced to choose Perfection of the life, or of the work, And if it take the second must refuse A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.

Could love you for yourself alone And not your yellow hair.

When such as I cast out remorse So great a sweetness flows into the breast We must laugh and we must sing, We are blest by everything, Everything we look upon is blest.

Labor is blossoming or dancing where The body is not bruised to pleasure soul, Nor beauty born out of its own despair, Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil. O chestnut tree, great-rooted blossomer, Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole? O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?

The night can sweat with terror as before We pieced our thoughts into philosophy, And planned to bring the world under a rule, Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.

The soul recovers radical innocence And learns at last that it is self-delighting, Self-appeasing, self-affrighting, And that its own sweet will is Heaven’s will.

We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.

Be secret and exult, Because of all things known That is most difficult.

The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.

In dreams begins responsibility. 4