Change and Transformation

Consume my heart away; sick with desire And fastened to a dying animal It knows not what it is; and gather me Into the artifice of eternity.

An aged man is but a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick, unless Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing For every tatter in its mortal dress.

All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.

I knew a phoenix in my youth, so let them have their day.

Though leaves are many, the root is one; Through all the lying days of my youth I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun; Now I may wither into the truth.

The friends that have it I do wrong When ever I remake a song Should know what issue is at stake, It is myself that I remake.

How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true, But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face.

Lo, all our pomp of yesterday Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!

The tumult and the shouting dies; The captains and the kings depart.

They change their skies above them, But not their hearts that roam.

O seasons, O châteaux, What soul is without flaws? 12

I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond, Is immortal diamond.

All things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise him.

Only a man harrowing clods In a slow silent walk With an old horse that stumbles and nods Half asleep as they stalk. Only thin smoke without flame From the heaps of couch grass: Yet this will go onward the same Though dynasties pass. Yonder a maid and her wight Come whispering by; War’s annals will cloud into night Ere their story die.

And as the smart ship grew In stature, grace, and hue, In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

A little Madness in the Spring Is wholesome even for the King.

Until the Desert knows That Water grows His Sands suffice But let him once suspect That Caspian Fact Sahara dies.

A word is dead When it is said, Some say. I say it just Begins to live That day.

Alter! When the Hills do— Falter! When the Sun Question if His Glory Be the Perfect One— Surfeit! When the Daffodil Doth of the Dew— Even as Herself—Sir— I will—of You—

The bloom is gone, and with the bloom go I.

Wandering between two worlds, one dead, The other powerless to be born.

There was a child went forth every day, And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became.

Through you I drain the pent-up rivers of myself, In you I wrap a thousand onward years.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.