Dying--shucks! If you kin handle the living, what's to be afraid of the dying?

For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.

Maybe a man has to sell his soul to get the power to do good.

For life is a fire burning along a piece of string--or is it a fuse to a powder keg which we call God?--and the string is what we don't know, our Ignorance, and the trail of ash, which, if a gust of wind does not come, keeps the structure of the string, is History, man's Knowledge, but it is dead, and when the fire has burned up all the string, then man's Knowledge will be equal to God's Knowledge and there won't be any fire, which is Life. Or if the string leads to a powder keg, then there will be a terrific blast of fire, and even the trail of ash will be blown completely away.

Nobody had ever told me that anything could be like this.

I don't expect you'll hear me writing any poems to the greater glory of Ronald and Nancy Reagan.

[A]nd soon now we shall go out of the house and go into the convulsion of the world, out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time.