A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.

Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers.

The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.

I know noble accents And lucid, inescapable rhythms; But I know, too, That the blackbird is involved In what I know.

Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.

I am one of you and being one of you is being and knowing what I am and know. Yet I am the necessary Angel of earth, since, in my sight, you see the earth again.

The genuine artist is never 'true to life.' He sees what is real, but not as we are normally aware of it. We do not go storming through life like actors in a play. Art is never real life.