Great Throughts Treasury

"To lose sensibility, to see what one sees, as if sight had not its own miraculous thrift, to hear only what one hears, one meaning alone, as if the paradise of meaning ceased to be paradise, it is this to be destitute."

"To say more than human things with human voice that cannot be; to say human things with more than human voice, that, also, cannot be; to speak humanly from the height or from the depth of human things, that is acutest speech."

"To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind."

"To what good, in the alleys of the lilacs, O caliper, do you scratch your buttocks and tell the divine ingénue, your companion, that this bloom is the bloom of soap and this fragrance the fragrance of vegetal?"

"To say of one mask it is like, to say of another it is like, to know that the balance does not quite rest, that the mask is strange, however like."

"To-morrow when the sun, for all your images, comes up as the sun, bull fire, your images will have left no shadow of themselves."

"Tom-tom, c'est moi. The blue guitar and I are one."

"Twenty men crossing a bridge, into a village, are twenty men crossing twenty bridges, into twenty villages, or one man crossing a single bridge into a village."

"Two things of opposite natures seem to depend on one another, as a man depends on a woman, day on night, the imagined on the real. This is the origin of change. Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace and forth the particulars of rapture come."

"Two forms move among the dead, high sleep who by his highness quiets them, high peace upon whose shoulders even the heavens rest, two brothers. And a third form, she that says good-by in the darkness, speaking quietly there, to those that cannot say good-by themselves."

"Two wooden tubs of blue hydrangeas stand at the foot of the stone steps. The sky is a blue gum streaked with rose. The trees are black. The grackles crack their throats of bone in the smooth air. Moisture and heat have swollen the garden into a slum of bloom. Pardie! Summer is like a fat beast, sleepy in mildew."

"Unfortunately there is nothing more inane than an Easter carol. It is a religious perversion of the activity of spring in our blood."

"Union of the weakest develops strength not wisdom. Can all men, together, avenge one of the leaves that have fallen in autumn? But the wise man avenges by building his city in snow."

"Under the eglantine the fretful concubine said, Phooey! Phoo! She whispered, Pfui!"

"Unless we believe in the hero, what is there to believe? Incisive what, the fellow of what good. Devise. Make him of mud."

"We ask which means most, for us, all the genii or one man who, for us, is greater than they. On his gold horse striding, like a conjured beast, miraculous in its panache and swish?"

"We do not prove the existence of the poem. It is something seen and known in lesser poems. It is the huge, high harmony that sounds a little and a little, suddenly, by means of a separate sense. It is and it is not and, therefore, is."

"We live in an old chaos of the sun."

"We enjoy the ithy oonts and long-haired Plomets, as the Herr Gott enjoys his comets."

"Weaker and weaker, the sunlight falls in the afternoon. The proud and the strong have departed. Those that are left are the unaccomplished, the finally human, natives of a dwindled sphere."

"We say God and the imagination are one… How high that highest candle lights the dark."

"We stand in the tumult of a festival. What festival? This loud, disordered mooch? These hospitaliers? These brute-like guests? These musicians dubbing at a tragedy, A-dub, a-dub, which is made up of this: that there are no lines to speak? There is no play."

"We say this changes and that changes. Thus the constant violets, doves, girls, bees and hyacinths are inconstant objects of inconstant cause in a universe of inconstancy."

"What is one man among so many men? What are so many men in such a world? Can one man think one thing and think it long? Can one man be one thing and be it long?"

"Well, an old order is a violent one. This proves nothing. Just one more truth, one more element in the immense disorder of truths."

"What One believes is what matters. Ecstatic identities between one's self and the weather and the things of the weather are the belief in one's element, the casual reunions, the long-pondered surrenders, the repeated sayings that there is nothing more and that it is enough."

"What is there in life except one's ideas, good air, good friend, what is there in life?"

"What more is to love than I have loved? And if there be nothing more, o bright, o bright, the chick, the chidder-barn and grassy chives and great moon, cricket-impresario, and, hoy, the impopulous purple-plated past, hoy, hoy, the blue bulls kneeling down to rest."

"What word have you, interpreters, of men who in the tomb of heaven walk by night, the darkened ghosts of our old comedy?"

"What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one's meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality."

"Why should she give her bounty to the dead? What is divinity if it can come only in silent shadows and in dreams?"

"With our bones we left much more, left what still is the look of things, left what we felt at what we saw."

"Words add to the senses. The words for the dazzle of mica, the dithering of grass, the Arachne integument of dead trees, are the eye grown larger, more intense."

"Yes: but the color of the heavy hemlocks came striding. And I remembered the cry of the peacocks."

"Yet I am the necessary angel of earth, since, in my sight, you see the earth again, cleared of its stiff and stubborn, man-locked set, and, in my hearing, you hear its tragic drone rise liquidly in liquid lingerings."

"When I think of our lands I think of the house and the table that holds a platter of pears, vermilion smeared over green, arranged for show."

"When this yokel comes maundering, whetting his hacker, I shall run before him, diffusing the civilest odors out of geraniums and unsmelled flowers. It will check him."

"What's down below is in the past like last night's crickets, far below."

"When was it that the particles became the whole man, that tempers and beliefs became temper and belief and that differences lost difference and were one? It had to be in the presence of a solitude of the self."

"Who can think of the sun costuming clouds when all people are shaken or of night endazzled, proud, when people awaken and cry and cry for help?"

"Yet there is no spring in Florida, neither in boskage perdu, nor on the nunnery beaches."

"Yet there was a man within me could have risen to the clouds, could have touched these winds, bent and broken them down, could have stood up sharply in the sky."

"Yet to speak of the whole world as metaphor is still to stick to the contents of the mind and the desire to believe in a metaphor. It is to stick to the nicer knowledge of belief, that what it believes in is not true."

"You could almost see the brass on her gleaming, not quite. The mist was to light what red is to fire. And her mainmast tapered to nothing, without teetering a millimeter's measure. The beads on her rails seemed to grasp at transparence."

"You know how Utamaro's beauties sought the end of love in their all-speaking braids. Alas! Have all the barbers lived in vain that not one curl in nature has survived?"

"You know that the nucleus of a time is not the poet but the poem, the growth of the mind of the world, the heroic effort to live expressed as victory. The poet does not speak in ruins nor stand there making orotund consolations. He shares the confusions of intelligence."

"You like it under the trees in autumn, because everything is half dead. The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves and repeats words without meaning."

"You were created of your name, the word is that of which you were the personage. There is no life except in the word of it."