“What is the boy now, who has lost his ball,What, what is he to do? I saw it goMerrily bouncing, down the street, and thenMerrily over-there it is in the water!”

“Huffy Henry hid the day, unappeasable Henry sulked. I see his point,--a trying to put things over. It was the thought that they thought they could do it made Henry wicked & away. But he should have come out and talked. All the world like a woolen lover once did seem on Henry's side. Then came a departure. Thereafter nothing fell out as it might or ought. I don't see how Henry, pried open for all the world to see, survived. What he has now to say is a long wonder the world can bear & be. Once in a sycamore I was glad all at the top, and I sang. Hard on the land wears the strong sea and empty grows every bed.”

“The marker slants, flowerless, day’s almost done, I stand above my father’s grave with rage, often, often before I’ve made this awful pilgrimage to one who cannot visit me, who tore his page out: I come back for more, I spit upon this dreadful banker’s grave who shot his heart out in a Florida dawn O ho alas alas When will indifference come, I moan & rave I’d like to scrabble till I got right down away down under the grass and ax the casket open ha to see just how he’s taking it, which he sought so hard we’ll tear apart the mouldering grave clothes ha then Henry will heft the ax once more, his final card, and fell it on the start.”

“Dream Song 187Them lady poets must not marry, pal.Miss Dickinson—fancy in Amherst bedding hér.Fancy a lark with Sappho,a tumble in the bushes with Miss Moore,a spoon with Emily, while Charlotte glare.Miss Bishop’s too noble-O.That was the lot. And two of them are hereas yet, and—and: Sylvia Plath is not.She—she her credentialshas handed in, leaving alone two totsand widower to what he makes of it—surviving guy, &when Tolstoy’s pathetic widow doing her whung(after them decades of marriage) & kids, she decided he was queer& loving his agent.Wherefore he rush off, leaving two journals, & die.It is a true error to marry with poetsor to be by them.”

“Soon part of me will explore the deep and dark Floor of the harbour . . I am everywhere, I suffer and move, my mind and my heart move With all that move me, under the water”

“I do strongly feel that among the greatest pieces of luck for high achievement is ordeal. Certain great artists can make out without it, Titian and others, but mostly you need ordeal. My idea is this: the artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business: Beethoven's deafness, Goya's deafness, Milton's blindness, that kind of thing.”

“The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business.”