and luckier.

The fact of it is nothing to do with seeing it happen — it's not gasps and blood and falling about — that isn't what makes it death. It's just a man failing to reappear, that's all — now you see him, now you don't, that's the only thing that's real: here one minute and gone the next and never coming back — an exit, unobtrusive and unannounced, a disappearance gathering weight as it goes on, until, finally, it is heavy with death.

The Utopians marvel that any mortal can take pleasure in the dubious sparkle of a little jewel or bright gemstone, wen he has a star, or the sun itself, to look at. They are amazed at the foolishness of any man who considers himself a nobler fellow because he wears clothing of specially fine wool. No matter how delicate the thread, they say, a sheep wore it once, and still was nothing but a sheep.

There are many people in the world,--you must have noticed them in the street,--how do they live? How do they get strength to put on their clothes in the morning?

Days pass like papers from a press.

“We were, fair queen, 

“Unnatural State of the Unicorn” by Yusef Komunyakaa

Art cold? I am cold myself.

And I have found Demetrius like a jewel, Mine own, and not mine own.

... these are the times of dreamy quietude, when beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean’s skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and would not willingly remember, that this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang.

Poetry can repair no loss, but it defies the space which separates. And it does this by its continual labor of reassembling what has been scattered.

The great number of surviving manuscripts of the poem and the successive versions they seem to represent need not appear to be so bewildering if one sees in this record of variation a record also of a poem which refused to stop becoming.

if there is a place further from me I beg you do not go

Damn me, it's worth a fellow's while to be born into the world, if only to fall right asleep.

My father had a daughter loved a man As it might be, perhaps, were I a woman, I should your lordship.