Memoriam Quotes

Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all.

I hold it true, whate'er befall; I feel it when I sorrow most; 'Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all. Verse XXVII

Ring out the old, ring in the new, Ring, happy bells, across the snow: The year is going, let him go; Ring out the false, ring in the true.

I sometimes hold it half a sin To put in words the grief I feel; For words, like Nature, half reveal And half conceal the Soul within. But, for the unquiet heart and brain, A use in measured language lies; The sad mechanic exercise, Like dull narcotics, numbing pain. In words, like weeds, I'll wrap me o'er, Like coarsest clothes against the cold: But that large grief which these enfold Is given in outline and no more. In Memoriam A.H.H. Section 5

So runs my dream, but what am I? An infant crying in the night An infant crying for the light And with no language but a cry.

Be near me when my light is low, When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick And tingle; and the heart is sick, And all the wheels of Being slow. Be near me when the sensuous frame Is rack'd with pangs that conquer trust; And Time, a maniac scattering dust, And Life, a fury slinging flame. Be near me when my faith is dry, And men the flies of latter spring, That lay their eggs, and sting and sing And weave their petty cells and die. Be near me when I fade away, To point the term of human strife, And on the low dark verge of life The twilight of eternal day.

I’m sorry. This is not what I intended to say. What I meant to say is this: You’ll write more poems. They are not lost. You are the poetry.

My dearest, darling Sidney,' There was nothing else. Only dead white paper, blank and meaningless. A comma, followed by nothing. Death summed up by grammar.

Beat, happy stars, timing with things below, Beat with my heart more blest than heart can tell, Blest, but for some dark undercurrent woe That seems to draw—but it shall not be so: Let all be well, be well.

I sometimes find it half a sin, To put to words the grief i feel, For words like nature,half reveal, and half conceal the soul within,

Ellwood smiled, and a sudden, dry bleakness spread over Gaunt’s heart as he thought of Hercules, and Hector, and all the heroes in myth who found happiness briefly, only for it not to be the end of the story.

I hold it truth, with him who sings To one clear harp in divers tones, That men may rise on stepping-stones Of their dead selves to higher things.

Gaunt was woven into everything he read, saw, wrote, did, dreamt. Every poem had been written about him, every song composed for him, and Ellwood could not scrape his mind clear of him no matter how he tried.

It was the Hell you’d feared in childhood, come to devour the children. It was treading over the corpses of your friends so that you might be killed yourself. It was the congealed evil of a century.

The dead leave us starving with mouths full of love.” from “Memoriam

In words, like weeds, I'll wrap me o'er, Like coarsest clothes against the cold

There rolls the deep where grew the tree. O earth, what changes hast thou seen! There where the long street roars, hath been The stillness of the central sea. The hills are shadows, and they flow From form to form, and nothing stands; They melt like mist, the solid lands, Like clouds they shape themselves and go.

For this alone on Death I wreak The wrath that garners in my heart: He put our lives so far apart We cannot hear each other speak.

Henry,' he [Ellwood] said, smoke tumbling out of his mouth in tendrils, 'are you all right?' 'I'm fine.' 'Yes, I know you're fine. But are you all right?

It seems unfair, doesn't it? Our parents got to live their whole lives without anything like this." "Busily building up the world that led to this.

It was much easier to be brave for your friends than for yourself.

Poor Elly, he thought, as he fell. It’s so much harder to be left behind.

And what delights can equal those That stir the spirit's inner deeps, When one that loves but knows not, reaps A truth from one that loves and knows?

You’re not afraid of dying, Henry. You’re just opposed to killing. That isn’t cowardice.

It's possible to name everything and to destroy the world.

And was the day of my delight As pure and perfect as I say?

Call me Sidney,” said Ellwood. “Sidney,” said Gaunt, so quickly, as if he had been waiting years to say it ... He pressed their foreheads together. “This means I’m keeping you,” he added, his voice fierce with warning. As if it wasn’t exactly what Ellwood wanted to hear. “You can have me,” he told Gaunt, and suddenly he couldn’t breathe.

He thought perhaps all the pain would sour the love, but instead it drew him further in, as if he were Marc Antony, falling on his own sword. And it was a magical thing, to love someone so much; it was a feeling so strange and slippery, like a sheath of fabric cut from the sky.

Our bodies were used to stop bullets, thought Ellwood. He could think of nothing else.

A beam in darkness: let it grow.

That loss is common would not make My own less bitter, rather more: Too common! Never morning wore To evening, but some heart did break. Verse VI

He recognised that bravery could only exist where there was fear, and so of all of them, only Gaunt was truly capable of heroism.

In the hypermasculine atmosphere of war, they were not overly concerned with manliness.

He missed England as if it were a person.

Their tenderness was hesitant and temporary, like a butterfly pausing on a child’s hand.

Writing is one method of dealing with being human or wanting to suicide cause in order to write you kill yourself at the same time while remaining alive.

I need anything, anything that will stop me from living in the kind of death the bourgeois eat, the death called comfort.

I falter where I firmly trod, And falling with my weight of cares Upon the great world's altar-stairs That slope thro' darkness up to God, I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope, And gather dust and chaff, and call To what I feel is Lord of all, And faintly trust the larger hope.

Dark house, by which once more I stand Here in the long unlovely street, Doors, where my heart was used to beat So quickly, waiting for a hand, A hand that can be clasp'd no more - Behold me, for I cannot sleep, And like a guilty thing I creep At earliest morning to the door. He is not here; but far away The noise of life begins again, And ghastly thro' the drizzling rain On the bald street breaks the blank day.

Amicitiae nostrae memoriam spero sempiternam fore

Do you believe in magic?” he asked. Ellwood paused for a while, so long that if he had been anyone else, Gaunt might have repeated the question. “I believe in beauty,” said Ellwood, finally. “Yes,” said Gaunt, fervently. “Me too.” He wondered what it was like to be someone like Ellwood, who contributed to the beauty of a place, rather than blighting it.

Sex. You can't lie to yourself sexually. If you don't want it, it's the most disgusting thing in the world.

Women need to become literary 'criminals,' break the literary laws and reinvent their own, because the established laws prevent women from presenting the reality of their lives.

Death is a debt which every one of us must pay.

Henry? Would you have kissed me, if it hadn’t been for the War?

Our little systems have their day; They have their day and cease to be… And thou, O Lord, art more than they.

I've decided it doesn't matter whether you love me back," said Gaunt.

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky, The flying cloud, the frosty light; The year is dying in the night; Ring out, wild bells, and let him die. Ring out the old, ring in the new, Ring, happy bells, across the snow: The year is going, let him go; Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Education,’ one of R’s teachers taught, ‘teaches you not to be yourself.’ But who is yourself? R decided if it or he wasn’t blood, it wasn’t anything.

England was filthy with ignorance, and the trenches were clean by comparison.

Nature, red in tooth and claw.

Ten minutes after death a man's a speck of black dust. Let's not quibble over individuals with memoriams. Forget them. Burn them all, burn everything. Fire is bright and fire is clean.

You’re not afraid of dying, Henry. You’re just opposed to killing. That isn’t cowardice.

Only one thought can comfort, and that is that he died, not for war, but for peace.

Come alive, dead heart, and sing.

Colored people don't like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don't feel good about Uncle Tom's Cabin. Burn it. Someone's written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book. Serenity, Montag. Peace, Montag. Take your fight outside. Better yet, into the incinerator. Funerals are unhappy and pagan? Eliminate them, too. Five minutes after a person is dead he's on his way to the Big Flue, the Incinerators serviced by helicopters all over the country. Ten minutes after death a man's a speck of black dust. Let's not quibble over individuals with memoriams. Forget them. Burn all, burn everything. Fire is bright and fire is clean.

it [In Memoriam] expressed exactly the nature of her own shock and sorrow, the very structure and slow process of pain, and the transformations and transmutations of grief, like rot in the earth-mould, like roots and other blind things moving in the grave.

Oh yet we trust that somehow good Will be the final goal of ill, To pangs of nature, sins of will, Defects of doubt, and taints of blood; That nothing walks with aimless feet; That not one life shall be destroy'd, Or cast as rubbish to the void, When God hath made the pile complete; That not a worm is cloven in vain; That not a moth with vain desire Is shrivell'd in a fruitless fire, Or but subserves another's gain. Behold, we know not anything; I can but trust that good shall fall At last—far off—at last, to all, And every winter change to spring. So runs my dream: but what am I? An infant crying in the night: An infant crying for the light: And with no language but a cry.

Let Love clasp Grief lest both be drown’d, Let darkness keep her raven gloss: Ah, sweeter to be drunk with loss, To dance with death, to beat the ground. —Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “In Memoriam A.H.H.

War is…a violent teacher?

What a waste Sandys' last days had been, thought Gaunt. Pathetically attempting to overcome a grief that would never have time to heal.

And it was a magical thing, to love someone so much; it was a feeling so strange and slippery, like a sheath of fabric cut from the sky.

But I remain'd, whose hopes were dim, Whose life, whose thoughts were little worth, To wander on a darken'd earth, Where all things round me breathed of him.

I hear the breaking bodies scream. Thankful I have hit my mark, I slither through the trenching dark. You bleed to death in all my dreams.

It was dusk, on a Friday. The battered skeletons of trees tapered against the fresh starlight in No Man's Land. The sky offered curious glimpses of beauty, from time to time. The men wrote about it in their letters, describing sunsets in painstaking detail to their families, as if there was nothing to see at the front but crimson clouds and dusted rays of golden light.

Gaunt paused in the doorway, a peculiar, fond smile on his lips. The same expression he used to get in school when Ellwood recited poetry to people who wished he wouldn’t; the same expression he had had on Divisional Rest in Loos, when Ellwood touched him more than was appropriate. It hadn’t ever changed. Gaunt had always looked at him like that, as if Ellwood’s flaws were qualities.

This has been a novel about some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did. They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed--run over, maimed, destroyed--but they continued to play anyhow. We really all were very happy for a while, sitting around not toiling but just bullshitting and playing, but it was for such a terrible brief time, and then the punishment was beyond belief: even when we could see it, we could not believe it. For example, while I was writing this I learned that the person on whom the character Jerry Fabin is based killed himself. My friend on whom I based the character Ernie Luckman died before I began the novel. For a while I myself was one of these children playing in the street; I was, like the rest of them, trying to play instead of being grown up, and I was punished. I am on the list below, which is a list of those to whom this novel is dedicated, and what became of each. Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error in judgment. When a bunch of people begin to do it, it is a social error,a life-style. In this particular life-style the motto is "Be happy now because tomorrow you are dying," but the dying begins almost at once, and the happiness is a memory. It is, then, only a speeding up, an intensifying, of the ordinary human existence. It is not different from your life-style, it is only faster. It all takes place in days or weeks or months instead of years. "Take the cash and let the credit go," as Villon said in 1460. But that is a mistake if the cash is a penny and the credit a whole lifetime. There is no moral in this novel; it is not bourgeois; it does not say they were wrong to play when they should have toiled;it just tells what the consequences were. In Greek drama they were beginning, as a society, to discover science, which means causal law. Here in this novel there is Nemesis: not fate, because any one of us could have chosen to stop playing in the street, but, as I narrate from the deepest part of my life and heart, a dreadful Nemesis for those who kept on playing. I myself,I am not a character in this novel; I am the novel. So, though, was our entire nation at this time. This novel is about more people than I knew personally. Some we all read about in the newspapers. It was, this sitting around with our buddies and bullshitting while making tape recordings, the bad decision of the decade, the sixties, both in and out of the establishment. And nature cracked down on us. We were forced to stop by things dreadful. If there was any "sin," it was that these people wanted to keep on having a good time forever, and were punished for that, but, as I say, I feel that, if so, the punishment was far too great, and I prefer to think of it only in a Greek or morally neutral way, as mere science, as deterministic impartial cause-and-effect. I loved them all. Here is the list, to whom I dedicate my love: To Gaylene deceased To Ray deceased To Francy permanent psychosis To Kathy permanent brain damage To Jim deceased To Val massive permanent brain damage To Nancy permanent psychosis To Joanne permanent brain damage To Maren deceased To Nick deceased To Terry deceased To Dennis deceased To Phil permanent pancreatic damage To Sue permanent vascular damage To Jerri permanent psychosis and vascular damage . . . and so forth. In Memoriam. These were comrades whom I had; there are no better. They remain in my mind, and the enemy will never be forgiven. The "enemy" was their mistake in playing. Let them all play again, in some other way, and let them be happy.

We swarmed through Africa and America because we were better than they, of course we were, we were making war humane, and now it has broken down and they are dragged into hell with us. We have doomed the world with our advancements, with our democracy that is so much better than whatever they’ve thought of, with our technology that will so improve their lives, and now Algerian men must choke to death on their own melted insides in wet Belgian trenches and I—

Where’s the rest of it?” said Ellwood, his voice rising unpredictably. “My,” just the word “my” would have been enough to live on, if Gaunt had ever called him that to his face. “He never called me Sidney. Not once, in five years.” He looked up at Hayes. “What does it mean?” “I don’t know,” said Hayes. He sat stiff and upright on the bed. “Why didn’t he finish it?” “I don’t know,” said Hayes. “He knew he was going to die.” “He thought you both would.” “But he never called me Sidney.” He never called him any of it. My, dearest, darling. Sidney. Ellwood leant back against the window, his throat stretching long as he looked up. “If Gaunt had been a girl, I should have married him in an instant,” he said.

TODAY I THINK MY RELATIONSHIP WITH HELL IS OVER. It was hell, the ancient hell. Hell: I believed that if I loved V enough, we would love each other. All I know is that I’ve been returned to earth violently; I’ve a duty to myself to survive and to see what is. I have to deal with the truth, with nothing else. Did V’s charity to me almost cause my death? I, starving, fed on the dream that V loved me and I lived a lie. So forgive me, You who knows that only truth matters. Yes—this dawn is at best difficult. The blood he let out of my skin, now dried and stiff, hurts me and there’s nothing else in my life but memories of him. Mental war is constant. Nonetheless, this is the eve before the morning. May I accept the influxes of vigor and whatever real tenderness floats by in these barren waters. And when dawn comes, armed with my patience which burns, I shall see the cities of humans which are splendid. The imagination is nothing unless it is made actual.

What hope is here for modern rhyme To him, who turns a musing eye On songs, and deeds, and lives, that lie Foreshorten'd in the tract of time? These mortal lullabies of pain May bind a book, may line a box, May serve to curl a maiden's locks; Or when a thousand moons shall wane A man upon a stall may find, And, passing, turn the page that tells A grief, then changed to something else, Sung by a long-forgotten mind. But what of that? My darken'd ways Shall ring with music all the same; To breathe my loss is more than fame, To utter love more sweet than praise.

It’s intimate.” Ellwood rubbed his nose. “Gaunt never called me that. I don’t think he felt close enough to me.

Mostly the men talk about the mud and the rats and God. We have to censor the mud and the rats, but God is allowed to remain, which strikes me as ironic.

What I meant to say is this: You’ll write more poems. They are not lost. You are the poetry.

It was a bright blue day. The green leaves curled playfully into the sky, and daffodils burst out like exclamation points among the tombstones.

Thine are these orbs of light and shade; Thou madest Life in man and brute; Thou madest Death; and lo, thy foot Is on the skull which thou hast made.

When in the down I sink my head, Sleep, Death's twin-brother, times my breath; Sleep, Death's twin-brother, knows not Death, Nor can I dream of thee as dead:

Long sleeps the summer in the seed. Verse CIV

Perplext in faith, but pure in deeds, At last he beat his music out. There lives more faith in honest doubt, Believe me, than in half the creeds. He fought his doubts and gather'd strength, He would not make his judgment blind, He faced the spectres of the mind And laid them: thus he came at length To find a stronger faith his own; And Power was with him in the night, Which makes the darkness and the light, And dwells not in the light alone,

That night I followed him whenever he let me. I had to. Followed him into strange, complicated actions, very far, bad and good actions. But I was never allowed into his world. What was I to him? A fantasy. I gave him another identity. Whenever I lay next to him in a bed and it was night, I was too excited to fall asleep, too unwilling to lose a chance that I might be allowed to enter his life. Since he wanted fantasy, what I wanted didn’t matter. I asked myself if there was any chance he would change. No. Change for him was fantastical. Yet I was, and still am, a victim of his charity.

The birds chattered merrily on the wet brown branches. Daffodils sunned out among the headstones. How alive it all seemed, and how gracious-to die in an era when your death bought you a brief moment at the centre of something. To be important, rather than one of millions.

Edie Sedgwick (1943-1971) I don't know how she did it. Fire She was shaking all over. It took her hours to put her make-up on. But she did it. Even the false eye-lashes. She ordered gin with triple limes. Then a limosine. Everyone knew she was the real heroine of Blonde on Blonde. oh it isn't fair oh it isn't fair how her ermine hair turned men around she was white on white so blonde on blonde and her long long legs how I used to beg to dance with her but I never had a chance with her oh it isn't fair how her ermine hair used to swing so nice used to cut the air how all the men used to dance with her I never got a chance with her though I really asked her down deep where you do really dream in the mind reading love I'd get inside her move and we'd turn around and she'd turn around and turn the head of everyone in town her shaking shaking glittering bones second blonde child after brian jones oh it isn't fair how I dreamed of her and she slept and she slept forever and I'll never dance with her no never she broke down like a baby like a baby girl like a lady with ermine hair oh it isn't fair and I'd like to see her rise again her white white bones with baby brian jones baby brian jones like blushing baby dolls

Come then, pure hands, and bear the head That sleeps or wears the mask of sleep, And come, whatever loves to weep, And hear the ritual of the dead.

The Hague Convention sought to make war more humane. We had reached a point in history where we believed it was possible to make war humane.

There rolls the deep where grew the tree O earth, what changes hast thou seen! There where the long street roars hath been. The stillness of the central sea.

Mit dem Mann, für den du dich entscheidest, entscheidest du dich auch für den Kummer, der dir am liebsten ist.

Let darkness keep her raven gloss: Ah, sweeter to be drunk with loss

This is the story of V and me. Look. Each person has the possibilities of being simultaneously several beings, having several lives. The good family man doesn’t have a sense of responsibility. Simultaneously, he’s my angel. Simultaneously, his family’s a pack of incontinent dogs. In front of men such as him who believe they’re respectable, I love to talk about who they really are, the people they don’t want to know and socially and politically chastise. Look. I have loved and worshiped a pig. This society hates and locks up its madness because they hate and lock up themselves. I know the system of schizophrenia. Nevertheless I loved a pig and couldn’t stop.

R wrote Delahaye about all that had happened to him and about what he, R, wanted: My friend, You’re eating white flour and mud in your pigsty. I don’t miss Charleville. I don’t miss being a bored pig where the sun dries up all brains but sloth. Your brains or feelings’re being dried up: dead pig Delahaye. Emotions are the movers of this world. Me: I’m thirsty. What I’m thirsty for—whom I’m thirsty for—I can’t get so I drink poisons. I’ve got to free myself. From what? Pain? Oh—for more poisons. Maybe more poisons’ll come and I’ll go so far, I’ll emerge. Something is trying to emerge from this mess. I don’t know how.

The greatest regret of my military career was as Commanding General of the 1st Cavalry Division in Iraq in 2004-2005, he later wrote of the decision he made. I lost 169 soldiers during that year-long deployment. However, the monument we erected at Fort Hood, Texas, in memoriam lists 168 names. I approved the request of others not to include the name of the one soldier who committed suicide. I deeply regret my decision.

My own dim life should teach me this, That life shall live for evermore, Else earth is darkness at the core, And dust and ashes all that is; This round of green, this orb of flame, Fantastic beauty such as lurks In some wild Poet, when he works Without a conscience or an aim. What then were God to such as I? 'Twere hardly worth my while to choose Of things all mortal, or to use A tattle patience ere I die; 'Twere best at once to sink to peace, Like birds the charming serpent draws, To drop head-foremost in the jaws Of vacant darkness and to cease.

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky, The flying cloud, the frosty light: The year is dying in the night; Ring out, wild bells, and let him die. Ring out the old, ring in the new, Ring, happy bells, across the snow: The year is going, let him go; Ring out the false, ring in the true. Ring out the grief that saps the mind, For those that here we see no more; Ring out the feud of rich and poor, Ring in redress to all mankind. Ring out a slowly dying cause, And ancient forms of party strife; Ring in the nobler modes of life, With sweeter manners, purer laws. Ring out the want, the care, the sin, The faithless coldness of the times; Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes, But ring the fuller minstrel in. Ring out false pride in place and blood, The civic slander and the spite; Ring in the love of truth and right, Ring in the common love of good. Ring out old shapes of foul disease; Ring out the narrowing lust of gold; Ring out the thousand wars of old, Ring in the thousand years of peace. Ring in the valiant man and free, The larger heart, the kindlier hand; Ring out the darkness of the land, Ring in the Christ that is to be

Sometimes I forget this insoluble mess and dream: he’ll save me, we’ll travel; we’ll hunt in the deserts, we’ll sleep on the pavements of strange cities, carelessly, without his guilt, without my pain. Or else I’m going to wake up and all the human laws and customs of this world will have changed—thanks to some magical power—or this world, without changing, will let me feel desire and be happy and carefree. What did I want from him who hurt me more than I thought it was possible for two people to hurt each other? I wanted the adventures found in kids’ books. He couldn’t give me these because he wasn’t able to. Whatever did he want from me? I never understood. He told me he was just average: average regrets, average hopes. What do I care about all that average shit that has nothing to do with adventure?

So word by word, and line by line, The dead man touch'd me from the past, And all at once it seem'd at last The living soul was flash'd on mine, And mine in his was wound, and whirl'd About empyreal heights of thought, And came on that which is, and caught The deep pulsations of the world, Æonian music measuring out The steps of Time—the shocks of Chance-- The blows of Death. At length my trance Was cancell'd, stricken thro' with doubt.

Coloured people don’t like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Burn it. Someone’s written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book. Serenity, Montag. Peace, Montag. Take your fight outside. Better yet, into the incinerator. Funerals are unhappy and pagan? Eliminate them, too. Five minutes after a person is dead he’s on his way to the Big Flue, the Incinerators serviced by helicopters all over the country. Ten minutes after death a man’s a speck of black dust. Let’s not quibble over individuals with memoriams. Forget them. Burn them all, burn everything. Fire is bright and fire is clean.

Unfortunately, the more time he [Gaunt] spent with Elisabeth, the more apparent it became how fruitless it was to try to want her. He could appreciate her beauty in an artistic sense, as if she were a sculpture in a museum, but it was a flat, textureless sort of admiration. If love was stepping off a cliff in the hope of flying, there was a wall at the precipice that had never been there with Sandys, or Ellwood, or even Devi, whom Gaunt had helplessly adored at thirteen. He felt no fear around Elisabeth, because there was no chance of falling. He was fond of her, but he would never say to her, '"Withhold no atom's atom of I die!

That which we dare invoke to bless; Our dearest faith; our ghastliest doubt; He, They, One, All; within, without; The Power in darkness whom we guess; I found Him not in world or sun, Or eagle's wing, or insect's eye; Nor thro' the questions men may try, The petty cobwebs we have spun: If e'er when faith had fall'n asleep, I heard a voice `believe no more' And heard an ever-breaking shore That tumbled in the Godless deep; A warmth within the breast would melt The freezing reason's colder part, And like a man in wrath the heart Stood up and answer'd `I have felt.' No, like a child in doubt and fear: But that blind clamour made me wise; Then was I as a child that cries, But, crying, knows his father near; And what I am beheld again What is, and no man understands; And out of darkness came the hands That reach thro' nature, moulding men.

I sing to him that rests below, And, since the grasses round me wave, I take the grasses of the grave, And make them pipes whereon to blow. The traveller hears me now and then, And sometimes harshly will he speak: `This fellow would make weakness weak, And melt the waxen hearts of men.' Another answers, `Let him be, He loves to make parade of pain That with his piping he may gain The praise that comes to constancy.' A third is wroth: `Is this an hour For private sorrow's barren song, When more and more the people throng The chairs and thrones of civil power? 'A time to sicken and to swoon, When Science reaches forth her arms To feel from world to world, and charms Her secret from the latest moon?' Behold, ye speak an idle thing: Ye never knew the sacred dust: I do but sing because I must, And pipe but as the linnets sing: And one is glad; her note is gay, For now her little ones have ranged; And one is sad; her note is changed, Because her brood is stol'n away.

O somewhere, meek unconscious dove, That sittest ranging golden hair; And glad to find thyself so fair Poor child, that waitest for thy love! For now her father's chimney glows In expectation of a guest; And thinking 'this will please him best,' She takes a riband or a rose; For he will see them on to-night; And with the thought her colour burns; And, having left the glass, she turns Once more to set a ringlet right; And, even when she turn'd, the curse Had fallen, and her future Lord Was drown'd in passing thro' the ford, Or kill'd in falling from his horse, O what to her shall be the end? And what to me remains of good? To her, perpetual maidenhood, And unto me no second friend.

The Dying Man" in memoriam W.B. Yeats 1. His words I heard a dying man Say to his gathered kin, “My soul’s hung out to dry, Like a fresh salted skin; I doubt I’ll use it again. “What’s done is yet to come; The flesh deserts the bone, But a kiss widens the rose I know, as the dying know Eternity is Now. “A man sees, as he dies, Death’s possibilities; My heart sways with the world. I am that final thing, A man learning to sing. 2. What Now? Caught in the dying light, I thought myself reborn. My hand turn into hooves. I wear the leaden weight Of what I did not do. Places great with their dead, The mire, the sodden wood, Remind me to stay alive. I am the clumsy man The instant ages on. I burned the flesh away, In love, in lively May. I turn my look upon Another shape than hers Now, as the casement blurs. In the worst night of my will, I dared to question all, And would the same again. What’s beating at the gate? Who’s come can wait. 3. The Wall A ghost comes out of the unconscious mind To grope my sill: It moans to be reborn! The figure at my back is not my friend; The hand upon my shoulder turns to horn. I found my father when I did my work, Only to lose myself in this small dark. Though it reject dry borders of the seen, What sensual eye can keep and image pure, Leaning across a sill to greet the dawn? A slow growth is a hard thing to endure. When figures our of obscure shadow rave, All sensual love’s but dancing on a grave. The wall has entered: I must love the wall, A madman staring at perpetual night, A spirit raging at the visible. I breathe alone until my dark is bright. Dawn’s where the white is. Who would know the dawn When there’s a dazzling dark behind the sun. 4. The Exulting Once I delighted in a single tree; The loose air sent me running like a child– I love the world; I want more than the world, Or after image of the inner eye. Flesh cries to flesh, and bone cries out to bone; I die into this life, alone yet not alone. Was it a god his suffering renewed?– I saw my father shrinking in his skin; He turned his face: there was another man, Walking the edge, loquacious, unafraid. He quivered like a bird in birdless air, Yet dared to fix his vision anywhere. Fish feed on fish, according to their need: My enemies renew me, and my blood Beats slower in my careless solitude. I bare a wound, and dare myself to bleed. I think a bird, and it begins to fly. By dying daily, I have come to be. All exultation is a dangerous thing. I see you, love, I see you in a dream; I hear a noise of bees, a trellis hum, And that slow humming rises into song. A breath is but a breath: I have the earth; I shall undo all dying with my death. 5. They Sing, They Sing All women loved dance in a dying light– The moon’s my mother: how I love the moon! Out of her place she comes, a dolphin one, Then settles back to shade and the long night. A beast cries out as if its flesh were torn, And that cry takes me back where I was born. Who thought love but a motion in the mind? Am I but nothing, leaning towards a thing? I scare myself with sighing, or I’ll sing; Descend O gentlest light, descend, descend. I sweet field far ahead, I hear your birds, They sing, they sing, but still in minor thirds. I’ve the lark’s word for it, who sings alone: What’s seen recededs; Forever’s what we know!– Eternity defined, and strewn with straw, The fury of the slug beneath the stone. The vision moves, and yet remains the same. In heaven’s praise, I dread the thing I am. The edges of the summit still appall When we brood on the dead or the beloved; Nor can imagination do it all In this last place of light: he dares to live Who stops being a bird, yet beats his wings Against the immense immeasurable emptiness of things.