Complete Poems

... we do not admire what we cannot understand.

I am hard to disgust, but a pretentious poet can do it

If we can't be cordial to these creatures' fleece, I think that we deserve to freeze.

Wolf's wool is the best wool, but it cannot be sheared, because the wolf will not comply. With knowledge as with wolves' surliness, the student studies voluntarily, refusing to be less than individual. He "gives his opinion and then rests upon it"; he renders service when there is no reward, and is too reclusive for some things to seem to touch him; not because he has no feeling but because he has so much.

... imaginary gardens with real toads in them ... ... if you demand on one hand, the raw material of poetry in all its rawness and that which is on the other hand genuine, then you are interested in poetry.

Truly as the sun can rot or mend, love can make one bestial or make a beast a man.

They fought the enemy, we fight fat living and self-pity. Shine, o shine, unfalsifying sun, on this sick scene.

You are not male or female, but a plan deep-set within the heart of man.

Poetry ... ... a place for the genuine, Hands that can grasp, eyes that can dilate, hair that can rise

Hate-hardened heart, O heart of iron, iron is iron till it is rust. There never was a war that was not inward;

Yule—Yul log for the Christmas-fire tale-spinner—of fairy tales that can come true: Yul Brynner.

The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; not in silence, but restraint.

repression, however, is not the most obvious characteristic of the sea; the sea is a collector, quick to return a rapacious look.

And whence is courage: the unanswered question, the resolute doubt,— dumbly calling, deafly listening—that in misfortune, even death, encourages others and in its defeat, stirs   the soul to be strong?

I, too, dislike it. Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it, after all, a place for the genuine.

Blessed is the man who “takes the risk of a decision” — asks himself the question: “Would it solve the problem? Is it right as I see it? Is it in the best interests of all?

Blessed the geniuses who know that egomania is not a duty.

Who rides on a tiger can never dismount; asleep on an elephant, that is repose.

Truth is no Apollo Belvedere, no formal thing. The wave may go over it if it likes. Know that it will be there when it says, "I shall be there when the wave has gone by.

So he who strongly feels, behaves.

The power of the visible is the invisible; as even where no tree of freedom grows, so-called brute courage knows.

Hate-hardened heart, O heart of iron, iron is iron till it is rust. There never was a war that was not inward; I must fight till I have conquered in myself what causes war, but I would not believe it. I inwardly did nothing. O Iscariot-like crime! Beauty is everlasting and dust is for a time.

... The world's an orphan's home. Shall we never have peace without sorrow? without pleas of the dying for help that won't come? O quiet form upon the dust, I cannot look and yet I must. If these great patient dyings - all these agonies and wound bearings and bloodshed- can teach us how to live, these dyings were not wasted.

Might verse not best confuse itself with fate?

But don’t give me, if I can’t have the dress, a trip to Greenland, or grim trip to the moon. The moon should come here. Let him make the trip down, spread on my dark floor some dim marvel, and if a success that I stoop to pick up and wear, I could ask nothing more.

You've the beat of a dancer to a measure or harmonious rush of a porpoise at the prow where the racers all win easily— like centaurs' legs in tune, as when kettledrums compete; nose rigid and suede nostrils spread, a light left hand on the rein, till well—this is a rhapsody.

Maine should be pleased that its animal is not a waverer, and rather than fight, lets the primed quill fall. Shallow oppressor, intruder, insister, you have found a resister.

the power of relinquishing what one would keep; that is freedom. Become dinosaur- skulled, quilled or salamander-wooled, more ironshod and javelin-dressed than a hedgehog battalion of steel, but be dull. Don’t be envied or armed with a measuring rod.

Hate-hardened heart, O heart of iron iron is iron till it is rust. There never was a war that was not inward; I must fight till I have conquered in myself what causes war, but I would not believe it. I inwardly did nothing. O Iscariot-like crime! Beauty is everlasting and dust is for a time.

Like strangler figs choking a banyan, not an explorer, no imperialist, not one of us, in taking what we pleased—in colonizing as the saying is—has been a synonym for mercy.