“They will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne.We shall return at twilight from the lecturePleased that the irrational is rational”

“Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreamsAnd our desires.”

“From this the poem springs: that we live in a place That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves And hard it is in spite of blazoned days.”

“The Plot Against The GiantFirst GirlWhen this yokel comes maundering,Whetting his hacker,I shall run before him,Diffusing the civilest odorsOut of geraniums and unsmelled flowers.It will check him.Second GirlI shall run before him,Arching cloths besprinkled with colorsAs small as fish-eggs.The threadsWill abash him.Third GirlOh, la...le pauvre!I shall run before him,With a curious puffing.He will bend his ear then.I shall whisperHeavenly labials in a world of gutturals.It will undo him.”

“She says, "But in contentment I still feelThe need for imperishable bliss."Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreamsAnd our desires.Is there no change of death in paradise?Does ripe fruit never fall? or do the boughsHang always heavy in that perfect sky,Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,With rivers like our own that seek for seasThey never find, the same receding shoresThat never touch with inarticulate pang?”

“THE POEMS OF OUR CLIMATEIClear water in a brilliant bowl, Pink and white carnations. The lightIn the room more like a snowy air, Reflecting snow. A newly-fallen snowAt the end of winter when afternoons return.Pink and white carnations - one desiresSo much more than that. The day itselfIs simplified: a bowl of white, Cold, a cold porcelain, low and round,With nothing more than the carnations there.IISay even that this complete simplicityStripped one of all one's torments, concealedThe evilly compounded, vital IAnd made it fresh in a world of white,A world of clear water, brilliant-edged,Still one would want more, one would need more,More than a world of white and snowy scents.IIIThere would still remain the never-resting mind,So that one would want to escape, come backTo what had been so long composed.The imperfect is our paradise.Note that, in this bitterness, delight,Since the imperfect is so hot in us,Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.”

“Two things of opposite natures seem to dependOn on another, as Logos dependsOn Eros, day on night, the imaginedOn the real. This is the origin of change.Winter and spring, cold copulars, embraceAnd forth the particulars of rapture come.Music falls on the silence like a senseA passion that we feel, not understand.Morning and afternoon are clasped togetherAnd North and South are an intrinsic coupleAnd sun and rain a plural, like two loversThat walk away together as one in the greenest body.”