For the beginning is assuredly the end- since we know nothing, pure and simple, beyond our own complexities.

It's a strange courage you give me ancient star: Shine alone in the sunrise toward which you lend no part!

We sit and talk quietly, with long lapses of silence, and I am aware of the stream that has no language, coursing beneath the quiet heaven of your eyes, which has no speech.

As birds' wings beat the solid air without which none could fly so words freed by the imagination affirm reality by their flight.

At our age the imagination across the sorry facts lifts us to make roses stand before thorns. Sure love is cruel and selfish and totally obtuse— at least, blinded by the light, young love is. But we are older, I to love and you to be loved, we have, no matter how, by our wills survived to keep the jeweled prize always at our finger tips. We will it so and so it is past all accident.

It is not fair to be old, to put on a brown sweater.

By listening to his language of his locality the poet begins to learn his craft. It is his function to lift, by use of imagination and the language he hears, the material conditions and appearances of his environment to the sphere of the intelligence where they will have new currency.