Justice and mercy/ Are human dreams, they do not concern the birds nor the fish nor eternal God.

Poetry is not a civilizer, rather the reverse, for great poetry appeals to the most primitive instincts.

There is no reason for amazement: surely one always knew that cultures decay, and life's end is death.

Still the mind smiles at its own rebellions.

When the sun shouts and people abound One thinks there were the ages of stone and the age of bronze And the iron age; iron the unstable metal; Steel made of iron, unstable as his mother; the tow-ered-up cities Will be stains of rust on mounds of plaster. Roots will not pierce the heaps for a time, kind rains will cure them, Then nothing will remain of the iron age And all these people but a thigh-bone or so, a poem Stuck in the world's thought, splinters of glass In the rubbish dumps, a concrete dam far off in the mountain.

They import and they consume reality.

civilization is a transient sickness.