“You need not see what someone is doing to know if it is his vocation, you have only to watch his eyes: a cook mixing a sauce, as surgeon making a primary incision, a clerk completing a bill of lading, wear that same rapt expression, forgetting themselves in a function. How beautiful it is, that eye-on-the-object look.”

“Behind the corpse in the reservoir, behind the ghost on the links, Behind the lady who dances and the man who madly drinks, Under the look of fatigue, the attack of migraine and the sigh There is always another story, there is more than meets the eye.”

“Every poet has his dream reader: mine keeps a look out for curious prosodic fauna like bacchics and choriambs.”

“Looking up at the stars, I know quite wellThat, for all they care, I can go to hell,But on earth indifference is the leastWe have to dread from man or beast.”

“Soft as the earth is mankind and both need to be altered.”

“Slowly we are learning,We at least know this much,That we have to unlearnMuch that we were taught,And are growing charyOf emphatic dogmas;Love like Matter is muchOdder than we thought.”

“In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster, the ploughman mayHave heard the splash, the forsaken cry,But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shoneAs it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green water,And the expensive ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.”