So I find words I never thought to speak In streets I never thought I should revisit When I left my body on a distant shore.

Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow

As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.

It seems just possible that a poem might happen to a very young man: but a poem is not poetry -That is a life.

If we really want to pray we must first learn to listen, for in the silence of the heart God speaks.

We might remind ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds when we read a book and feel an emotion about it, for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism.

Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them. There is no third.