From Emerson's "Love"
"...a fire that kindling its first embers in the narrow nook of a private bosom, caught from a wandering spark out of another private heart, glows and enlarges until it warms and beams upon multitudes of men and women , upon the universal heart of all, and so lights up the whole world and all nature with its generous flames."
"...power to his heart and brain, which created all things new; which was the dawn in him of music, poetry, and art; which made the face of nature radiant with purple light ...when a single tone of voice could make the heart bound, when the youth becomes a watcher of widows, a veil, a ribbon, the wheels of carriage; when no place is too solitary, and none too silent, for him who has richer company and sweeter conversation in his new thoughts, than any old friends, though best and purest, can give him; for the figures, the motions, the words of the beloved object are not like other written images in water but,...'enamelled in fire,' and make the study of midnight."
"when the moonlight was a pleasing fever, and the stars were letters, and the flowers ciphers, and the air was coined into a song..."
"The passion rebuilds the world for the youth. It makes things alive and significant. Nature grows conscious. Every bird on the boughs of the tree now sings to the heart and the soul. The notes are almost articulate. The clouds have faces as he looks on them. The trees of the forest, the waving grass, and the peeping flowers have grown intelligent; and he almost fears to trust them with the secret which they seem to invite. "
"Love Prays"
The Act
There were the roses, in the rain.
Don't cut them, I pleaded.
They won't last, she said.
But they're so beautiful
where they are.
Agh we were all beautiful once, she
said,
and cut them and gave them to me
in my hand.
-William Carlos Williams
Song
You are forever April
to me
the eternally unready
forsynthia a blond
straight-
legged girl
whom I myself
ignorant
as I was taught
to read the poems
my arms
about your neck
we clung together
peril-
ously
more than a young
girl
should know
a burst of frost
nipped
yellow flowers
in the spring
of
the year.
-WCW
The New Clouds
The morning that I first loved you
had a quality of fine division about it
a lightness and a light full of
small round clouds all rose upon the
ground which bore them, a light of
words upon a paper sky, each a meaning
and all a meaning jointly. It was a
quiet speech, at ease but reminiscent
and of praise-with a disturbance
of waiting. Yes! a page that glowed
by all that it was not, a meaning more
of meaning than the text whose
seperate edges were the edges of the sky.
-WCM
