Life

O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!

Although she feeds me bread of bitterness, And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth, Stealing my breath of life, I must confess I love this cultured hell that tests my youth! Her vigor flows like tides into my blood, Giving me strength erect against her hate. Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood.

I should be proud to have my memory graced, but only if the monument be placed… here, where I endured three hundred hours in line before the implacable iron bars.

There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

Yet we have gone on living, Living and partly living.

Birth, and copulation, and death. That’s all the facts when you come to brass tacks.

Fish say, they have their stream and pond; But is there anything beyond?

Magnificently unprepared For the long littleness of life.

It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.

One’s grand flights, one’s Sunday baths, One’s tootings at the weddings of the soul Occur as they occur.

She says, “But in contentment I still feel The need of some imperishable bliss.” Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams And our desires.

Let be be finale of seem. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

And as he came he saw that it was spring, A time abhorrent to the nihilist Or searcher for the fecund minimum.

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?

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.

Us the most fleeting of all. Just once, everything, only for once. Once and no more. And we, too, once. And never again. But this having been once, though only once, having been once on earth—can it ever be canceled?

And were an epitaph to be my story I’d have a short one ready for my own. I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.

But strictly held by none, is loosely bound By countless silken ties of love and thought To everything on earth the compass round, And only by one’s going slightly taut In the capriciousness of summer air Is of the slightest bondage made aware.

I’d like to get away from earth awhile And then come back to it and begin over. May no fate willfully misunderstand me And half grant what I wish and snatch me away Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love: I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.

I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.

Degenerate sons and daughters, Life is too strong for you— It takes life to love life.

The hand and lash that beat down frigid Rome? What sacred drama through her body heaved When world-transforming Charlemagne was conceived?

I pray—for fashion’s word is out And prayer comes round again— That I may seem, though I die old, A foolish, passionate man.

He that sings a lasting song Thinks in a marrowbone.