On a lone winter evening, when the frost Has wrought a silence.

... for, by all the stars That tend thy bidding, I do think the bars That kept my spirit in are burst - that I Am sailing with thee through the dizzy sky! How beautiful thou art!

Feeling well that breathed words Would all be lost, unheard, and vain as swords Against the enchased crocodile, or leaps Of grasshoppers against the sun.

A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving in a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore; it’s to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out. It is an experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery.

Alas! when passion is both meek and wild!

There was an awful rainbow once in heaven: We know her woof, her texture; she is given In the dull catalogue of common things. Philosophy will clip an angel's wings.

The poetry of the earth is never dead.