“At the door of life, by the gate of breath,There are worse things waiting for men than death.”

“Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath;/ We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death”

“Before the beginning of yearsThere came to the making of manTime, with a gift of tears;Grief, with a glass that ran;Pleasure, with pain for leaven;Summer, with flowers that fell;Remembrance, fallen from heaven,And madness risen from hell;Strength without hands to smite;Love that endures for a breath;Night, the shadow of light,And Life, the shadow of death.”

“Love, that is first and last of all things made,The light that has the living world for shade,The spirit that for temporal veil has onThe souls of all men woven in unison,One fiery raiment with all lives inwroughtAnd lights of sunny and starry deed and thought,And alway through new act and passion newShines the divine same body and beauty through,The body spiritual of fire and lightThat is to worldly noon as noon to night;Love, that is flesh upon the spirit of manAnd spirit within the flesh whence breath began;Love, that keeps all the choir of lives in chime;Love, that is blood within the veins of time;That wrought the whole world without stroke of hand,Shaping the breadth of sea, the length of land,And with the pulse and motion of his breathThrough the great heart of the earth strikes life and death,The sweet twain chords that make the sweet tune liveThrough day and night of things alternative,Through silence and through sound of stress and strife,And ebb and flow of dying death and life:Love, that sounds loud or light in all men's ears,Whence all men's eyes take fire from sparks of tears,That binds on all men's feet or chains or wings;Love that is root and fruit of terrene things;Love, that the whole world's waters shall not drown,The whole world's fiery forces not burn down;Love, that what time his own hands guard his headThe whole world's wrath and strength shall not strike dead;Love, that if once his own hands make his graveThe whole world's pity and sorrow shall not save;Love, that for very life shall not be sold,Nor bought nor bound with iron nor with gold;So strong that heaven, could love bid heaven farewell,Would turn to fruitless and unflowering hell;So sweet that hell, to hell could love be given,Would turn to splendid and sonorous heaven;Love that is fire within thee and light above,And lives by grace of nothing but of love;Through many and lovely thoughts and much desireLed these twain to the life of tears and fire;Through many and lovely days and much delightLed these twain to the lifeless life of night.”

“The half-brained creature to whom books are other than living things may see with the eyes of a bat and draw with the fingers of a mole his dullard's distinction between books and life: those who live the fuller life of a higher animal than he know that books are to poets as much part of that life as pictures are to painters or as music is to musicians, dead matter though they may be to the spiritually still-born children of dirt and dullness who find it possible and natural to live while dead in heart and brain.”

“I wish we were dead together to-day, Lost sight of, hidden away out of sight, Clasped and clothed in the cloven clay,Out of the world's way, out of the light, Out of the ages of worldly weather, Forgotten of all men altogether,As the world's first dead, taken wholly away,Made one with death, filled full of the night.”

“Ah, had I not taken my life up and given All that life gives and the years let go,The wind and honey, the balm and leaven, The dreams reared high and the hopes brought low?Come life, come death, not a word be said;Should I lose you living, and vex you dead?I never shall tell you on earth; and in heaven,If I cry to you then, will you hear or know?”