Serenity and Inner Peace

I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.

My quietness has a man in it, he is transparent and he carries me quietly, like a gondola, through the streets.

When will indifference come.

I long for the imperishable quiet at the heart of form.

Patio, heaven’s watercourse. The patio is the slope down which the sky flows into the house. Serenely eternity waits at the crossway of the stars.

A condition of complete simplicity (Costing not less than everything) And all shall be well and All manner of thing shall be well 10 When the tongues of flame are infolded Into the crowned knot of fire And the fire and the rose are one.

Love is most nearly itself When here and now cease to matter. Old men ought to be explorers Here and there does not matter We must be still and still moving Into another intensity For a further union, a deeper communion Through the dark cold and the empty desolation, The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless.

Because these wings are no longer wings to fly But merely vans to beat the air The air which is now thoroughly small and dry Smaller and dryer than the will Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still.

And I have asked to be Where no storms come, Where the green swell is in the havens dumb, And out of the swing of the sea.

Calm Soul of all things! make it mine To feel, amid the city’s jar, That there abides a peace of thine, Man did not make, and can not mar.

Dark mother always gliding near with soft feet, Have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome?

Come lovely and soothing death, Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving, In the day, in the night, to all, to each, Sooner or later delicate death.

I am grown peaceful as old age tonight.

Let’s contend no more, Love, Strive nor weep: All be as before, Love, —Only sleep!

He has outsoared the shadow of our night; Envy and calumny and hate and pain, And that unrest which men miscall delight Can touch him not and torture not again; From the contagion of the world’s slow stain He is secure, and now can never mourn A heart grown cold, a head grown gray in vain.

Me this unchartered freedom tires; I feel the weight of chance desires; My hopes no more must change their name, I long for a repose that ever is the same.

It is a beauteous evening, calm and free, The holy time is quiet as a nun Breathless with adoration.

Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep! The river glideth at his own sweet will! Dear God! the very houses seem asleep; And all that mighty heart is lying still!

O’er all the hilltops Is quiet now, In all the treetops Hearest thou Hardly a breath; The birds are asleep in the trees: Wait; soon like these Thou too shalt rest. 16

Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast, Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round, And, while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn Throws up a steamy column, and the cups, That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each, So let us welcome peaceful evening in.

Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife, Their sober wishes never learn’d to stray; Along the cool sequester’d vale of life They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.

Calm of mind, all passion spent.

Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail Or knock the breast, no weakness, no contempt, Dispraise, or blame, nothing but well and fair, And what may quiet us in a death so noble.