The mirror is believed the way a poem is believed. It's believed because it's there.

I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation.

Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.

The truth is that the poems are ecstatic.

Love After Love The time will come when, with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each will smile at the other's welcome, and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.

We make too much of that long groan which underlines the past.

All of Victorian verse is pentameter.