Since the printing press came into being, poetry has ceased to be the delight of the whole community of man; it has become the amusement and delight of the few.
When the last sea is sailed and last shallow charted,
When the last field is reaped and the last harvest stored,
When the last fire is out and the last guest departed
Grant the last prayer that I pray, Be good to me, O Lord.
I hold that when a person dies / His soul returns again to earth; / Arrayed in some new flesh disguise / Another mother gives him birth / With sturdier limbs and brighter brain.
God dropped a spark down into everyone, And if we find and fan it to a blaze, It'll spring up and glow, like--like the sun, And light the wandering out of stony ways.
Man cannot call the brimming instant back;
Time's an affair of instants spun to days;
If man must make an instant gold, or black,
Let him, he may; but Time must go his ways.
Life may be duller for an instant's blaze.
Life's an affair of instants spun to years,
Instants are only cause of all these tears.
So death obscures your gentle form, So memory strives to make the darkness bright; And, in that heap of rocks, your body lies, Part of the island till the planet ends, My gentle comrade, beautiful and wise, Part of this crag this bitter surge offends, While I, who pass, a little obscure thing, War with this force, and breathe, and am its king.
In the dark room where I began My mother's life made me a man. Through all the months of human birth Her beauty fed my common earth. I cannot see, nor breathe, nor stir, But through the death of some of her.
So shall I fight, so shall I tread,
In this long war beneath the stars;
So shall a glory wreathe my head,
So shall I faint and show the scars,
Until this case, this clogging mould,
Be smithied all to kingly gold.
State are not made, nor patched; they grow;
Grow slow through centuries of pain,
And grow correctly in the main;
But only grow by certain laws,
Of certain bits in certain jaws.