Life

Where can we live but days?

Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies. And be it gash or gold it will not come Again in this identical disguise.

Time held me green and dying Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

In the sun that is young once only, Golden in the mercy of his means.

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees Is my destroyer. And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

Light breaks where no sun shines; Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart Push in their tides.

The absolutes the eternities Their outlying districts Are not my theme I am hungry for life and for death also I know what I know and I write it.

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.

I don’t see how Henry, pried open for all the world to see, survived.

Mountainous, woman not breaks and will bend: sways God nearby: anguish comes to an end. Blossomed Sarah, and I blossom. Is that thing alive? I hear a famisht howl.

I have had to learn the simplest things last. Which made for difficulties.

Now I adore my life With the Bird, the abiding Leaf, With the Fish, the questing Snail, And the Eye altering all; And I dance with William Blake For love, for Love’s sake.

Nothing would give up life: Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath.

This urge, wrestle, resurrection of dry sticks, Cut stems struggling to put down feet, What saint strained so much, Rose on such lopped limbs to a new life?

And children swarmed to him like settlers. He became a land.

Patrick Maguire, the old peasant, can neither be damned nor glorified: The graveyard in which he will lie will be just a deep-drilled potato-field Where the seed gets no chance to come through To the fun of the sun. The tongue in his mouth is the root of a yew.

O my floating life Do not save love to the flood

Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.

In the middle of the road there was a stone there was a stone in the middle of the road there was a stone in the middle of the road there was a stone.

anyone lived in a pretty how town (with up so floating many bells down) spring summer autumn winter he sang his didn’t he danced his did.

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song, A medley of extemporanea; And love is a thing that can never go wrong; And I am Marie of Roumania.

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain; Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink.

How strange a thing is death, bringing to his knees, bringing to his antlers The buck in the snow… Life, looking out attentive from the eyes of the doe.

My candle burns at both ends; It will not last the night; But, ah, my foes, and, oh, my friends— It gives a lovely light. 1