Our difficulties of the moment must always be dealt with somehow, but our permanent difficulties are difficulties of every moment.

The dove descending breaks the air With flame of incandescent terror Of which the tongues declare The one discharge from sin and error. The only hope, or else despair Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre- To be redeemed from fire by fire. Who then devised the torment? Love. Love is the unfamiliar Name Behind the hands that wove The intolerable shirt of flame Which human power cannot remove. We only live, only suspire Consumed by either fire or fire.

Footfalls echo in the memory, down the passage we did not take, towards the door we never opened, into the rose garden.

Now that lilacs are in bloom She has a bowl of lilacs in her room And twists one in her fingers while she talks. "Ah, my friend, you do not know, you do not know What life is, you who hold it in your hands"; (slowly twisting the lilac stalks) "You let it flow from you, you let it flow, And youth is cruel, and has no remorse And smiles at situations which it cannot see." I smile, of course, And go on drinking tea.

Good poets borrow, great poets steal

Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance

Oh, do not ask, 'What is it?'/Let us go and make our visit.