I went on all over the States, ranting poems to enthusiastic audiences that, the week before, had been equally enthusiastic about lectures on Railway Development or the Modern Turkish Essay.

To begin at the beginning: It is a spring moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black.

This poem has been called obscure. I refuse to believe that it is obscurer than pity, violence, or suffering. But being a poem, not a lifetime, it is more compressed.

This world is half the devil's and my own, Daft with the drug that's smoking in a girl and curling round the bud that forks her eye.

When one burns one's bridges, what a very nice fire it makes.

Friend, my enemy, I call you out. You, you, you there with a bad thorn in your side. You there, my friend, with a winning air. Who pawned the lie on me when he looked brassly at my shyest secret. With my whole heart under your hammer. That though I loved him for his faults as much as for his good. My friend were an enemy upon stilts with his head in a cunning cloud. -Dylan Thomas

The land of my fathers. My fathers can have it.