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

I think, that if I touched the earth, It would crumble; It is so sad and beautiful, So tremulously like a dream.

Beginning with doom in the bulb, the spring unravels.

[I'm]a freak user of words, not a poet.

The moment of a miracle is unending lightning.

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.

And when the firemen turned off the hose and were standing in the wet, smoky room, Jim's Aunt, Miss. Prothero, came downstairs and peered in at them. Jim and I waited, very quietly, to hear what she would say to them. She said the right thing, always. She looked at the three tall firemen in their shining helmets, standing among the smoke and cinders and dissolving snowballs, and she said, "Would you like anything to read?