It is a test (a positive test, I do not assert that it is always valid negatively), that genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

There will be time, there will be time To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.

Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.

After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

For last year's words belong to last year's language And next year's words await another voice.

And through the spaces of the dark Midnight shakes the memory As a madman shakes a dead geranium.

What is this self-inside us, this silent observer, severe and speechless critic, who can terrorize us, and urge us onto futile activity, and in the end, judge us still more severely for the errors into which his own reproaches drove us?