If you look at a thing, the very fact of your looking changes it...if you think about yourself, that very fact changes you.

I longed to know the world's name.

A symbol serves to combine heart and intellect.

We are the prisoners of history. Or are we?

Reality is not a function of the event as event, but of the relationship of that event to past, and future, events.

A young man's ambition - to get along in the world and make a place for himself - half your life goes that way, till you're 45 or 50. Then, if you're lucky, you make terms with life, you get released.

The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful.