... an ugly, lovely town ... crawling, sprawling ... by the side of a long and splendid curving shore. This sea-town was my world.

Somebody's boring me. I think it's me.

Never be lucid, never state, if you would be regarded great.

One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.

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.

My tears are like the quiet drift of petals from some magic rose; and all my grief flows from the rift of unremembered skies and snows. I think that if I touched the earth, it would crumble; it is so sad and beautiful, so tremulously like a dream.

The best poem is that whose worked-upon unmagical passages come closest, in texture and intensity, to those moments of magical accident.