Like a long-legged fly upon the stream His mind moves among silence |
Man can embody truth bet he cannot know it. |
Man can embody truth but he cannot know it. 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. |
May God be praised for woman That gives up all her mind, A man may find in no man a friendship of her kind. |
May she be granted beauty and yet not Beauty to make a stranger's eye distraught, Or hers before a looking-glass, for such, Being made beautiful overmuch, Consider beauty a sufficient end, Lose natural kindness and maybe The heart-revealing intimacy That chooses right, and never find a friend. |
My fiftieth year had come and gone, I sat, a solitary man, In a crowded London shop, And open book and empty cup On the marble table-top. |
Mysticism has been in the past and probably ever will be one of the great powers of the world and it is bad scholarship to pretend the contrary. You may argue against it but you should no more treat it with disrespect than a perfectly cultivated writ |
Never to have lived is best, ancient writers say; Never to have drawn the breath of life, never to have looked into the eye of day; The second best's a gay goodnight and quickly turn away. |
No expectation fails there, No pleasing habit ends, No man grows old, no girl grows cold, But friends walk by friends. |
Nor dread nor hope attend A dying animal; A man awaits his end Dreading and hoping all. |
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight, Nor public men, nor cheering crowds. |
Nothing but sweetness can remain when hearts are full of their own sweetness. |
Now as at all times I can see in the mind's eye, In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones Appear and disappear in the blue depth of the sky With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones, And all their helms of silver hovering |
Now I know that twenty centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, and what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? |
Now that my ladder's gone I must lie down where all ladders start In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart. |